


Relics

by bellis



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Aurors, F/M, Minor Queenie Goldstein/Jacob Kowalski, Theseus makes an appearance or two, some OCs as well but I try not to overdo that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2018-10-07 22:17:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10370910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellis/pseuds/bellis
Summary: Percival Graves's funeral is on January 30th, 1927.





	1. Chapter 1

In the end, they didn’t find Graves; at least not until long after it was too late.

They did find doubts, whole heaps of them, going in all directions and inwards and outwards; distrust, which still stung even after they were sure Grindelwald did not have any help from among their own ranks; a lot of frustration, and unhealthy ways of responding.

And after three weeks, they found a corpse; bruised and drained of magic and frozen in a spell like an insect in amber. There was cursing, the non-magical kind, low and suppressed and all the more bitter for it, but once that was done, there was mostly silence. Silent, cold fury, because Grindelwald went to the trouble of suspending Graves’s body in time like that, so that—what? To preserve for them the moment after which they were always going to be too late? To make some twisted point? To show off, to pour salt into the scrapes and grazes on their knuckles? They set their jaws and refused to wonder. The man’s mind must be a disfigured thing none of them want to dwell on. In hindsight, they probably should have. But hindsight is easier than foresight.

The afternoon of January 30th, 1927 is clear and quiet, a day in grayscale, sunless but bright. An irritable wind pushed wispy, scattered snow through the city streets all morning, but at two o’clock, an hour before the funeral, it settled down.

Tina tries to make the thing seem more real by counting delegates MACUSA friends family miscellaneous, but she gives up quickly. Everything is black, and people won’t hold still. The massive attendance is expected, considering Graves’s name, position, reputation. Strangely, it makes the whole affair still harder to grasp.

She looks over at O’Brien; whom she always liked well, but they worked closely together in the past weeks, and she’s found they understand each other easily without many words. But his eyes are on something, the lettered ribbon on one of the wreaths, perhaps, and he’s clearly far away in his thoughts.

This isn’t the first funeral they’re all attending. But this one comes as the conclusion to something gruelling, and marks a caesura they all never expected.

Belinda Periwinkle, next to the President where her new position puts her, is pale and thin-lipped, the perpetual crease between her fine eyebrows severe. When she speaks, she speaks for all of them now, Tina and O’Brien and Costanza and everyone else in the department, but she hardly knows them. She came from the Chicago office, and she’s firm and competent and self-assured and didn’t grudge them their obsessiveness during the search; but she doesn’t know them. Tina would bet her wand that she isn’t the only one who’d rather Periwinkle had let one of them, one of Graves’s people, make this speech.

Picquery’s speech is short, evenly worded, clear. Tina watches her, a little surprised. She doesn’t know much about her and Graves’s relationship beyond what everyone knows, and what was readily visible. It’s always hard to tell when people are titles and responsibilities as much as they are human beings, and Tina couldn’t have said if she believes they considered each other friends. But she would have thought that the President would have had some more personal words, some less perfect sentences, than this.

Across from Tina, Theseus Scamander looks on with a grimly set expression that says there couldn’t have been a worse time for this to happen. She can tell by the way the look on his face is mirrored in others, that he isn’t the only one who regrets the loss of a colleague in whom he had confidence, but she also knows that he, at least, regrets more than that. She knows this because—

—and here’s the one good thing to come out of all this: Theseus Scamander came in the company of his younger brother. Newt stands next to her and looks more human in his sympathy than all of the foreign and domestic dignitaries combined. Including Graves’s parents.

Tina supposes there’s some unspoken rule that applies from a certain peg on the social ladder upwards, that emotions are petty things, and decorum comes first, even at times like this. But she fails to see the point in it, and studies the mother’s face: graceful, like a painting, pale, powdery, and so composed it’s almost off-putting. Tina wonders if the woman is different behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the entire international magical community.

Graves’s father looks stern, as though he, too, were paying his respects to a colleague, not his child. Tina wonders how far she’s off the mark. A family of aurors. Does that make it different?

She leans a half-step to the side and slips her gloved hand into Newt’s; and decides she’d rather be this: red around the nose and the eyes, because it’s been some long weeks and there’s the fact that they all failed to do their jobs properly, individually and collectively; there’s the fact that they trusted Graves, and were proud to work under him, and they’re all tired and disappointed in themselves and sorry, and they’ve been able to tell from one another’s faces for weeks that they’ve tried imagining it: Graves, Grindelwald, how it went down, how it began and how it ended.

They don’t really know. A bit better now, after the post-mortem and the analysis of the forensics from the place Graves was kept, but the wickerwork of curses and hexes, their residues and imprints, was so dense and thick, disintegrating at intersections and calcifying at others, that sometimes it had become almost impossible to tell one thing apart from another, or even recognise it for what it had been. It was the same with the cocoon of spells wrapped around Graves’s body.  _We could pick it apart_ , Merle said,  _but it would take some weeks._  And for what, was the question that she didn’t add, but Picquery nodded as if in response to it.

For what? They’ve all had their moments, through the past weeks, when they’d rather not have known anything at all.

Picquery’s eyes were cool and quite calm, resting with a steadiness on Graves’s white face that, in hindsight, Tina finds odd. But then, she’s always thought it hard to imagine what it must be like to carry the kind of responsibility that the President does. Who knows what was going through her head during those minutes, or is going through her head now.

It’s a living nightmare, a chimera: Grindelwald at large, and the shock of his latest coup bone-deep because if he could get to someone like Graves, and someone in Graves’s position, then—. And they’re all united here in this respectful, sombre kind of kinship, but in an hour they’ll be asking again _Whose fault_  and  _How could_  and they’ll be calling for resignation and continuity by turns, just like they were an hour ago, and it’s all just very strange.  

Picquery presents a medal to Graves’s mother, and then the casket sinks slowly into the ground.

The wind picks up again.

—

That night, when it feels very late but isn’t really, Tina finds herself at the bar of the hotel MACUSA has put up some of the visitors, including the British Minister for Magic and his DMLE.

People clad in black stand talking in small groups, and occupy most of the tables. The few guests who did not attend a funeral that day, look like special colour illustrations in a black-and-white magazine.

Tina sits next to Newt with her fingertips tingling as though the cold of the New York City winter hadn’t dissipated from them a long while ago.

She was fine, being patient, knowing England was a long way away and who could say what might be anyway, but now that Newt is here again, and they’re sitting here with their shoulders touching, she finds she’s suddenly running low on patience. She sips on her drink, to perhaps stock up on some.

“Are you sure that it would cancel out spells the same way, though? This is two substances interacting, isn’t it?” Theseus asks. He’s across from Tina again; he’s handsome, confident, drinking no-maj bourbon with a kind of twist to his lip. She thinks he might have a wicked sense of humour. He evidently has no qualms about looking the other way. Tina would like to know if this is because it’s Newt he’s talking to, or because he shares her sense, the one that keeps getting her in trouble, that at times the right thing isn’t the right thing.

Newt says, “Yes, it’s the venoms. But I’m almost entirely certain it applies to all forms of memory modification. All the tests suggest it.” He glances at Tina, shy smile at the corner of his mouth. “And at any rate, there’s no way to be any more certain at this point. Without actually testing it  _on_  another muggle.”

Theseus frowns. “When did you run tests?”

Newt looks a little sheepish. “Not at the Ministry. I went to Hogwarts. I didn’t tell them why I thought Murtlap and Swooping Evil venoms interact, of course,” he assures Tina. “They’re usually happy to just humour my theories, which—,” to Theseus again: “The Ministry usually isn’t.”

Theseus raises an eyebrow. Eventually, he mutters, “Fair enough.”

Tina takes a deep breath, and looks at Newt, just so she can see the bright confidence in his eyes. It’s already so familiar to her, so much a part of him, and it’s like sunshine to her after the past weeks. “I’ll take it to Picquery when things have settled down a bit,” she decides. “I know it’s a risk, but—”

But Queenie cries too much these days, and keeps wondering out loud about London, Paris, Vienna, places where she and Jacob could live together. Places that are far away from New York. London is very far away.

“I really do believe the worst that can happen is, she’ll have Jacob Obliviated again, and he’ll have to start remembering all over.” Newt shrugs, and smiles. “So she might as well approve his naturalisation.”

“She might as well.” Tina smiles back. “Imagine that.” Then she sits up and her smile shifts a little with her. “I have to go. Everyone else went to the Blind Pig, for a drink. You know. As a private farewell?” She glances over at Theseus, and he gives her a nod. Suddenly, she wonders what kind of boss he is, and how it would be, if Picquery doesn’t—“How long will you be in New York for?” she asks Newt, before her imagination can make her wistful.

“Oh! I want to go on up to Alaska, I’ve heard some interesting speculations about a population of Keelut in the Hebrides. They’d make a great last addition to my book. But of course, if I do that, I need to study the origin species first.” He pauses, and then blurts, “But not right away. In a few days, perhaps.”

Tina is almost certain she sees Theseus shake his head, just minutely, out of the corner of her eye. She grins. “Well, that’s good to know. Then perhaps you could come to dinner tomorrow? I know Queenie would love to properly see you, and I think she’s asked Jacob over, too. And you have to come see the bakery.”

“Yes,” Newt says. “That would be lovely.”

“All right.” She thinks for a moment, and then gives him a peck on the cheek, and takes her leave.

—

Perhaps it all worked in their favour, Tina thinks some time later. Perhaps she’s growing into a callous person, because she slipped the request for Jacob’s naturalisation, with Newt’s study on the interactions of Murtlap and Swooping Evil venoms attached, in between far weightier documents bound for the President’s desk.

She hopes for the best, and she’s lucky.

Around her, nothing has settled down, but Queenie kept talking about Europe, and laughing and crying, and Tina couldn’t sit still anymore. And Picquery looked more serious than she used to before Grindelwald, a thing Tina would hardly have thought possible, but evidently—thankfully—that means her mind is on things more urgent than one no-maj, and a report by Auror Goldstein with a few minute holes in it.

And so the application returned to her with Picquery’s signature and seal a few days later, and that was that.

Queenie squealed and hugged her and didn’t stop smiling for the rest of the week. They went to tell Jacob together the morning after the approval came through, and Tina’s seen him speechless plenty of times, but never like that. There was lots of powdered sugar getting everywhere, and lots of laughter and many tears, and they all came away with sticky cheeks and fingertips. It took a vast weight off Tina’s chest, and put the first proper smile on her face since Newt left for Alaska.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is a writing experiment of sorts, and I'm not sure where it's going, or how far. But in the spirit of not overthinking (i.e. the point of the experiment), I'm posting :)
> 
> And in the spirit of credit: I stole Auror Costanza from dustbunnyprophet's [New York, 1926](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8707072?view_full_work=true).


	2. Chapter 2

With Newt gone again, and Queenie all smiles, picking out fabrics at Macy’s and making strudel for Jacob’s Sunday special, Tina turns all the attention that work will let her spare back to finding Modesty Barebone.

The magical underworld is busy, making the very best of the situation, much like scavenging animals. After the funeral, when nothing else was to be done about any of it but find Grindelwald, which—well. When everything was improbably back to business as usual on some surface level, O’Brien, standing by her desk with a cup of coffee one morning, said, “The cleanup’s only just coming. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

He was right. The underworld learned some new tricks while no one was looking too closely because they were looking somewhere else, and now many things are back at square one for Periwinkle’s department. There’s lots of overtime, and many nasty surprises. Tobias Wilks gets hit in the chest with a curse during a raid, and dies two days later. It stuns them all. It’s as if something like that shouldn’t have been possible, not now. Tina tried to put her finger on why it feels so much more wrong now, than these things always do. She can’t figure it out.

O’Brien pats her on the shoulder and says, “This’ll pass, like everything else. A year from now, we’ll all have different problems.”

“Looking forward,” Tina muttered. She watched Picquery stride past and thought that the pressure that she was under, was showing. The President is under scrutiny and constant questioning from the International Confederation, and Tina has heard more than one rumour that she’s considering stepping down. She doesn’t know if there’s anything to it. She also doesn’t know if she’d think of it as a good thing, all considered, or not.

Seraphina Picquery was elected President the year Tina started auror training, and Tina could never help admiring someone like her: her confidence and grace, her beauty and resoluteness, the arrow-straight narrative of her career. But since Credence, Tina hasn’t been able to tell just how she feels about the woman.

 _She didn’t have to. She didn’t have to._ Did she? What would Tina be thinking if it had been someone else, someone she’d never met or came to care about, if she’d have seen the same thing Picquery must have: an over-powerful force like a volcanic eruption, to the whole world’s best knowledge entirely uncontrollable, taking the city to pieces like some child’s building-block castle; making the damage too great to be fixable. What would she have done, if she’d been in Picquery’s shoes?

Tina unfolds Newt’s latest letter and reads it again. She swears she can smell the Alaskan snow and the fur coats. They haven’t talked about Credence in some time now. At first, they did, often. In writing, and then after the funeral, in the back of Jacob’s bakery after closing time, with tea and a mountain of baked goods left over from the business day between them.

Jacob’s base of regular customers has all but doubled in the short space since he received a second passport: now that Queenie brings his pastries to work, and talks about him, and he’s advertising in the _Ghost_ because he can’t believe living images of his grandmother’s paczki perpetually twirling through a snowcloud of sugar, are something that now exists in his world.

In a week, Queenie will move out of their rooms at Mrs. Esposito’s, and into an apartment a block away. That isn’t far. It’s so much closer than London. Tina is happy for her, very very happy, and tells herself it’ll be fine. This is how it should be. And if there’s one thing in the world she wants, it’s for her sister to be happy.

“You’ll come to dinner at least three times a week, Teen, and we’ll be home every weekend until you get tired of us,” Queenie told her brightly, and Tina smiled. _Home_ , she thought.

It’s the best thing to have happened in a long time, but it makes Tina miss Newt more. She spends whole evenings scowling and huffing at her heart, because she really isn’t such a sappy romantic, and she doesn’t _fall in love_ like this. But in truth, she supposes, she would have if she’d met Newt sooner. _It’s not me, it’s you_.

She reads about Keelut and sled dogs getting into the case and making friends with the occamies, and ‘I’m considering keeping them all because for reasons that are entirely beyond me, they’re the first creatures I’ve met that the niffler has some respect for.’

All through December and January, they wondered about Credence, and eventually they weren’t so certain anymore; yes, they saw it; they both did; Queenie saw it, too, and she says she _heard_ something, faint and formless like an echo, but—but time passes and they begin to think that they were only wishing so hard. A small wisp of the energy that is an obscurus is what they saw, but obscurus and obscurial are not one and the same, so that little wisp, that little wisp—how could that still have had all of Credence in it? They saw a little wisp disappear between the rubble, just before it dissolved, they have to assume.

Newt reads books while he travels, when he isn’t watching or writing, but there’s few, and he’s read them all before, in Sudan. There’s nothing new, and his letters said, ‘I’m not sure it would be possible. The obscurus unravels the host so it can have the pure, raw magic, and then it weaves them back together: like we’ve seen. But if the obscurial dies, the magic leaves, and if there’s nothing left to weave back together—’ Twenty aurors between them leave very little to be salvaged if their order was to kill. And if Credence had survived, wouldn’t they know by now? Wouldn’t he have come to her for help? Surely he would have known he could trust her?

Queenie has said many times that Tina picked the wrong job, because she feels too much. She feels it way too much when there’s someone she can’t save, and there’s always too many people like that in the wide world. Tina’s always thought it strange that Queenie, of all people, should say such a thing because if anything, it makes them more alike. But perhaps it’s that Queenie can’t shield herself when Tina could have; at least better than this.

At the end of the day, the wondering doesn’t lead anywhere, and so Tina put the _if_ s and _surely_ s aside as best she could, and went looking for Modesty: something she _could_ do. Looking for a person she knows hasn’t dissolved into splashes of smoke and then to nothing.

It’s somewhere in the middle of February, grey and cold days chasing each other through Tina’s mind in a strange blur, and she finally caught a glimpse of the girl the weekend before. Modesty is hiding amidst other orphans in the streets of New York, and it isn’t hard for her to do, because no one else seems to be looking for her. Tina stood in front of the destroyed church, the rubble just the same as it was the day the obscures pulled the wood beams to the ground, and thought there must be papers that say Mary Lou Barebone had three adopted children. One lay dead not far from her. The other two are gone. Don’t no-maj folk look for their missing?

Does it not matter, because Modesty is a girl without a family?

She doesn’t seem to speak much to the other children, and they seem to be avoiding her most of the time. Tina wonders if these are the same children that used to come to Mary Lou’s church; they must be. The first time Tina sees her, Modesty vanishes from her sight again within the minute. The second time, she notices Tina, and stares at her for some moments, and then runs. Tina catches up with her in an alley, a dead end, and it hurts in her chest how frightened Modesty seems. She talks a bit, but doesn’t go any nearer the girl, and then walks away. She leaves a chocolate bar she carried in her pocket in the spot where she’d stood. The third time she’s done all that, she just catches a movement out of the corner of her eye as she’s turning to leave. Modesty has straightened up from her crouch, and taken a step towards her. One step, but that’s a start.

A little later, Modesty shows her a wand snapped in two. “I had to look for two days to find it,” she says. Her voice is so quiet, Tina has to hold her breath to hear her. “It was just a toy, but it was my ma’s. My real ma’s. Mary Lou broke it.”

Tina looks at the pieces in her palm and says, “Modesty. This is a real wand.”

The core is still whole: a strand of hair, Tina can’t tell of which creature. But more tellingly than that, she can feel the magic thrum very, very weakly through it.

Modesty looks frightened.

Tina takes a deep breath and says, gently as she can: “I can help you.” She just isn’t sure yet how, exactly.


	3. Chapter 3

Two weeks of chocolate bars, apples, and Jacob’s cinnamon twist occamies, and Modesty is sitting next to Tina on a bench in Battery Park, watching ships go by on the Hudson. She’s wrapped in a knitted scarf Tina brought her a few days ago, an old one that Queenie once made. It’s a peach colour that makes Modesty look still paler than usual.

Tina folds a candy bar wrapper into a paper bird and enchants it to flutter away, in a swoop over the railing along the promenade, and towards the grey water. It lands gracefully, and bobs on the waves, batting its wings a time or two until Tina lets the charm fade.

Modesty stares at it, her small hands around the edge of the bench, dusty like all of her. Tina realises with a pang that her little entertainment didn’t please the girl, but made her tense.

She knows that Modesty keeps coming up to her in the street because she’s very young, and lonely, scared, and hungry all the time; that she came here with her, at worst because she thinks she had to, at best because she wants to trust Tina. But not because she does.

“Modesty, what’s wrong?”

The girl chews on her bottom lip. It’s a good minute before she quietly says, “He did that, too.”

“Who?”

The word leaps from Tina’s lips like a startled animal, because recently, the only one everyone around her has been referring to by pronoun only, no context needed, has been Grindelwald. As though he’d been apotheosised somehow by the way he threw all their lives into disarray, and keeps messing with their working hours and waking thoughts while no one in the magical world knows where he is, and it’s an itch in their fingertips and a cold breath down the backs of their necks, and solid anger in their stomachs.

But, of course, Modesty can’t know any of that. Except—

“That man that promised my brother to teach him magic. Credence told me about it. He made a wilted flower beautiful again. And Credence believed him, and now he’s gone.”

Tina breathes out a silent curse. She doesn’t know if this was Graves himself, or Grindelwald, but it hardly matters.

Modesty must think they’re all Pied Pipers, no better than Mary Lou Barebone. Or, perhaps, worse than her.

“I’m so very sorry for what happened to Credence, Modesty. I wish I could have stopped it, but—”

“Magic is bad,” Modesty says quietly. “And that man was bad.”

Tina wants to say, _No, Mr. Graves was a good man. He meant it, he would have helped Credence. But Grindelwald_ —But she knows she can’t explain it. It would be too much, and could only sound like wild fabrication to someone who’s only ever seen the dark side of the magical world.

So instead she says, “Yes. He was. But not because of magic.”

Modesty presses her lips together and stares at the gravel on the ground. She must feel so lost, Tina thinks, and cornered, and confused.

She wishes, not for the first time in her life, that she had Queenie’s Legilimency; or at least was more adept at that kind of spellwork. Although, truth be told, even if she were better at it, her scruples would probably hold her back from using such magic on a little girl. So she just lets a little more time pass, takes a deep breath of the cold spring air, and points at the river, where the paper bird has long since floated away.

“My mother taught me the charm I just showed you,” she says. “I think I was about your age then. It was summer, but I had a cold and couldn’t play with my sister and our neighbours’ children, and I was bored and grumpy. So my mother made a bird out of some paper, just like that one, and taught me how to charm it so it could fly around our kitchen. It took me all afternoon until I could do it as well as her. I wasn’t very good with charms at first.” She pauses, and looks over at Modesty; thinking how she’s never seen such a serious child. But really that’s no great surprise.

“Do you remember your mother, Modesty?”

Modesty twists her small hands into her skirt, and nods minutely.

“Do you believe that she was a bad person?”

Modesty hesitates: Mary Lou’s doing, no doubt. But eventually, she shakes her head, all the more vehemently for how it evidently took her some courage.

“No. Magic isn’t bad, you know? It doesn’t make a person bad. It isn’t good, either. It just exists, like air, or water. It’s only that bad people use it for bad things. Like they do everything else.”

Modesty seems to consider that for a while, and Tina can’t for the life of her tell if she’s cracked the ice, or only scared the girl off more. Finally, Modesty asks: “Is your sister a lot like you?

Tina has to smile. _Goodness, no._ “We’re quite different, actually. Queenie’s a lot better at charms than me, for one.” She pauses. “Perhaps I can bring her along one of these days, when I come to see you.” And then she thinks of Jacob, because Jacob, Jacob is just as unfamiliar with the magical world as Modesty, and he’s seen the darkness of it, but he fell head over heels in love anyway because he’s also seen the beautiful, and the very good and the very bright. Perhaps Jacob, much more than Tina or even Queenie, could show magic to Modesty in a way that wouldn’t frighten her.

Tina crosses her feet at the ankles and tries to remember not to get ahead of herself; because she always does, and it’s one thing if she breaks her own heart over it, but quite another if it’s someone else’s. Most of all, she tries not to think too clearly of Credence.

Beside her, Modesty slips her hand in the pocket of her dress and brings out another, wrinkled wrapper, from a Baby Ruth bar Tina gave her days ago. She holds it out to Tina, and looks straight at her. She doesn’t do that often.

“Can you make another bird?”

 

*

 

While Tina is making paper birds in Battery Park, Newt, on a fading afternoon in early March, is crouching beside an old juniper on a shingly hillside in the Outer Hebrides, chafing his hands for warmth.

“See,” he whispers to Pickett, “see, right over there. Can you see it?” Newt is almost certain Pickett can’t see anything that far away, but he’s still so tense with excitement, he might as well be just a twig Newt stuck in his buttonhole. _Bowtruckles. Surprisingly empathetic._ It makes Newt smile.

But then something pulls on his line of vision, and he whispers, _Shhh now,_ because he sees something move out of the corner of his eye. Not a Keelut. The Keelut bolt.

Newt holds his breath, and scans the heather, the tree line, the spaces between the rocks that dot the hillside like something that slipped through a hole in some giant’s pocket as he meandered past.

He can’t see anything.

This has happened a few times now: he’s always sure there’s something there, but when he tries to look, it’s gone. Like some trick of the light, only he doesn’t believe it’s something wrong with his vision, because he isn’t the only one who notices: the animals do, too, and everything around him. It’s like the quiet of this region, the quiet of nature left to itself, of jagged rock, cold air, and empty land, deepens to a silence; breathless and frozen, like something petrified.

Newt waits, unmoving like everything around him, going in his mind through all the catalogue of creatures he knows, hoping for a match. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s acquired a stowaway, and he knows that one drawback of his suitcase certainly is the sheer amount of magic it necessarily concentrates within itself. To some beings, it’s like a will-o’-the-wisp as bright as a beacon.

A breeze sweeps in from where the island crests and plunges down to the sea some distance off, and the hush is broken. Newt sighs, and peers down at Pickett, who looks back at him, just as puzzled.

Then it happens again: movement in the corner of his eye, only this time, he realises almost immediately that it’s different. This time, when he looks, the thing doesn’t disappear.

Newt shrinks back behind the leaning trunk of the juniper, and squints, trying to make out what just appeared out of nowhere about a hundred feet from him. He hesitates. _Curiosity killed the cat_ , as Theseus never tires of reminding him, but he thinks, he thinks that’s a person he’s seeing, someone Apparated, but this is very far north, and very remote, and very uninteresting terrain, for someone other than him to just be here.

So he ignores his better judgement and approaches slowly, quietly, while Pickett disappears into the fold of his scarf.


	4. Chapter 4

Six weeks after Percival Graves’s funeral, something trips the wards that skirt the grounds surrounding Seraphina’s house.

The protective charms remain intact, only something magical brushed against them from the outside. With purpose.

She picks up her wand from the table and walks outside, across the lawn and down towards the water. The wind whispers around her, lazily stirring the quiet night, unconcerned.

She can feel when she steps through her wards, a ripple in the air that runs across her skin, like sinking through the surface of a still, temperate pool.

The marshes are a strange place, a romping ground for wisps of magic, like breezes or echoes; and spirits, ghosts, jinn who love the damp; all manner of beings. Some nights they are few and quiet, and some they are not, but they almost never come close enough to the wards to set off the alarms. They sense the charge, and have no interest in the magical shock of contact.

Seraphina can feel the ground get wetter, softer, as she walks on. This place is between water and earth, between staying and leaving, solid and liquid; that’s why so much comes here that belongs nowhere. She casts a soft, diffuse Lumos and tufts of cord-grass appear indistinctly a little way ahead, nodding solemnly and whispering to one another.

There’s a jetty, not for boats – the reeds are too dense where the last pair of bollards disappears downwards, the water not an inch deep; she isn’t sure why it was put there, perhaps the swamp has spread out over decades. But she used to sit there when she was younger, as a child and later, home from Ilvermorny in the summer, or at Christmas; dreaming, relishing the solitude. The summer before her last year of school was the last year she came here like that, and it returns to her vividly now as she stops in her tracks.

Someone is on the jetty, sitting at the edge. Seraphina sucks a sharp breath through her teeth, a searing anger flaring in her chest.

There’s a man there, and he looks exactly like Percival Graves.

She twists her wand a quarter turn clockwise: an odd habit she never managed to shake. She ought to angle her wand down, straighter than this and ahead: for attack instead of aid. But her arm feels heavy like a shot of poison running from her shoulder into her fingertips. Her words are cross-threaded at the back of her throat, until she gets a hold on them.

“What are you?” she spits. “What do you want?”

The thing looks at her calmly, like it’s waiting, gauging; and it looks at her like—

_These things manipulate_ , Seraphina hears her grandmother’s voice say. _Trick and manipulate, it’s all they know to do. Never listen too well, or look too close._ The children of magicfolk in these stretches of country are taught to always just look past the things they meet in the swamps. Don’t be discourteous, for these things have nasty tempers. But look past, always just past.

Seraphina lets the brightness of her charm weaken a little: it’s all she can do. She’s so outraged, her head is beginning to spin from it. _How dare you. How dare you._

“See,” the being with Graves’s face says, “I thought it might be better to meet you out here, rather than just walk in the lobby at Woolworth. You’d have hurled at least three hexes at me by now, if I’d done that.”

She would have. At MACUSA, where she’d be surrounded by security, and wouldn’t need anybody’s help to begin with because at MACUSA, things are in their proper places. She wouldn’t have allowed room for a shadow of a doubt.

But here, in the frayed, unsure space of the salt marshes, between last night and tomorrow morning, the first thing that people think of when they see someone who should be gone, isn’t a transfiguration spell.

“What,” Seraphina repeats, “do you want?”

He gets up slowly, and he knows what they teach the children of the South, too, so he steps just a little closer to the light. If she looked past him now, it’d be obvious.

But, here’s the problem: looking closely, she should see things out of order, things not quite right, incongruous. If nothing else, it’s always the eyes. Eyes hold too much of someone, and dead things don’t understand any of it.

Something inside her whispers warningly, _Don’t be fooled_! But she knows well how the voice of her instinct sounds, and this isn’t it.

“What the hell,” she breathes, and she’ll be damned if it, he, doesn’t hear her exactly right; if he doesn’t relax just a little, and look at her the way she’s seen a thousand times.

“After everything I’ve seen of the man,” he says (there’s no flicker in his voice, no echo, all the tell-tale signs are missing), “I’m ready to forgive you for not noticing it was Grindelwald walking around masquerading as me for days. But I would have thought you’d do a proper post-mortem on that no-maj you put in the ground.”

Her thoughts and her anger lose their momentum as one. _Some spells only work while no one is looking_ , Hallowdale said one day in Defense class. The memory suddenly is as clear in Seraphina’s mind as cut crystal, and she has a sinking feeling why. Dully, she says, “What?”

Graves smiles wryly, but not without affection. Like she’s seen a thousand times.

“You’re slacking, Picquery.” He nods at her wand. “Go on.”

Seraphina stares at him, calculating, trying hard to listen to her mind rather than her heart. She says, “Cast a Patronus.”

His face tells her he feared she might ask that, and her fingers tense around her wand; something in her chest tenses, too.

“I’m not sure if I can.”

“Try.”

He sighs. It takes a few moments, and it isn’t a strong charm. She doubts it would be enough, in this state, to fight off much more than a mildly interested lethifold. But it’s as clearly recognisable to her as Graves’s signature, or that particular look he has to tell her, across a room full of delegates, just what he thinks of them all (most of them, anyway): the feline shape, agile and quite graceful, quite fierce; just a little drowsy now, much like a housecat startled from a nap.

But it’s enough to prove to her that he’s human, and alive. And himself.

Seraphina lets her wand sink to her side, and is suddenly keenly aware of how her feet have grown icy from the cold, wet ground. Her breath hitches a time or two. _Fool me twice,_ she thinks, with some disbelief.

“Where have you _been_?”

“Different places. I don’t know. Scotland, last. Don’t ask how I got away from him. My magic’s—well, probably it was mostly sheer dumb luck.” _God_ , Seraphina thinks. His syllables slant away into a dialectic inflection when he’s tired or very distracted, something from a long time ago in his Irish ancestry. She hears it now and surely, even if she’s missed something, been somehow outwitted, _again_ , that would be too subtle, too precise? 

“He took you with him when he left New York.”

Graves nods, but offers nothing else. Seraphina reaches out and puts a hand on his arm, realising only with the movement that she’s stepped close enough to do it.

“You’re shaking.”

“Well, I feel shaken. It’s all been—” He makes a vague gesture with one hand, and no attempt to finish the sentence.

Seraphina breathes out. She takes one step back and stares at him for a long time. Her face is all cast in shadow, but her eyes glint. “I buried you.”

“So I hear.”

She turns her head away and sniffs delicately. Then, abruptly, she fixes him with one of her Looks. “If you make any inordinate effort to get a hold of the speech I gave at that damn funeral—”

He laughs. “Why? Was it surprisingly cool and impersonal?”

Seraphina shakes her head, half exasperated and half light-headed. “Come on,” she says quietly. If this were any of her aurors in her stead, they’d be in for a lecture on recklessness and emotional responses. _Fool me twice, shame on me,_ she thinks. _Fool me thrice, what comes after the third time?_

*

The house is warm like relief after the chill of the marshes. With a flick of her wand Seraphina stokes the fire she lit earlier, against the cool of the spring night and the tiredness in her bones.

In her sitting room, the coffee table is covered in dispatches, notes, files. Graves stops by it, but she goes straight to her potions cabinet. A small beaded tassel adorns the key in the lock, a gift from her niece who’s long since lost interest in making such things. Seraphina feels the strings of glass like water against her fingertips for a moment, then she opens the cabinet and picks out the bottle of Veritaserum.

She holds it in her hand: amber-tinted glass, quite plain; the script on the label is Maud Grieve’s unmistakeable scrawl, and Seraphina wonders, for the hundredth time, why the woman doesn’t sacrifice quaintness to print like everyone else, or at least leave the handwriting to her assistants.

Seraphina lets perhaps a minute slip by.

“Come, Sera,” Graves says. “Give it here.”

He started calling her Sera after that last summer. Instead of Phina, like he had before, like all her friends did and do. He pronounces it differently than her family. _Sarah_. She always thought it would start annoying her, but it never has, and now it’s just who she is to him. She taps the bottle with a fingernail. “I don’t want to.”

And Mercy Lewis, that sounded maudlin. She hears Graves huff a laugh, and right he is. “When did you get so sentimental?” he asks. Then after a pause, “You know what I’m going to say. Don’t you?” ~~~~

_Yes_. This is her oldest friend, she knows him better than anyone else in the world, she knows what he can do, so she _knows_. Graves has as little trouble deflecting the Imperius as she does, but there are many ways to wear down someone’s defences and get into their head, given time.

Then she realises he may have been asking something quite different: _You know I’m not with him. Don’t you?_

She feels a brief flare of anger, and isn’t sure at what; herself, him, Grindelwald, or the fact that sometimes things are beyond her control.

That thought, even though it’s familiar like the taste of coffee on her tongue, rushes like cold water down her spine. She finds herself wondering if, come morning, they should just leave a dead no-maj in the ground, and find a different way to go forward from here; without MACUSA, without the ICW. There would be more than one.

Of course they won’t do any such thing. They’d both have to be very different people for that. But it’s a comforting notion, for a moment.

She looks at Graves over her shoulder, and thinks, _Third time’s the charm_. “Of course I know,” she says, mostly truthfully.

Slowly, she takes a potions jigger from the cabinet and measures out a dose of the Veritaserum.

The stuff tastes strange, lavender and mint and something cloyingly sweet underneath. Graves wrinkles his nose at it, but he doesn’t hesitate. Seraphina counts to twenty and while she does, tries to bring some clarity to her head. Veritaserum, like the Imperius, can be resisted. But after the Patronus, and the way his body felt to her touch out on the jetty, she doesn’t think he could right now.

Seraphina sighs. Suddenly, she’s endlessly impatient to get this over with; to be able to feel proper relief. It’s been some months, after all.

“Does Grindelwald have any hold over you now? Either your thoughts or your actions?”

Graves studies her for just a moment, eyes firmly on hers. “No.”

Seraphina releases a breath she seems to have been holding, somewhere, since the moment she stepped onto the jetty, and pinches the bridge of her nose. She feels like she hadn’t slept since December. “My God. This is _not_ one for the training files.”

“No. Start to finish, it isn’t.” Graves runs a hand through his hair. It’s grown out, longer than she’s seen it in years and years; but somewhere between Grindelwald and now, he evidently found the opportunity and time to shave, and finally Seraphina suddenly has a crowd of questions on the tip of her tongue; she wants to know: to assess, use, fill in the gaps.

She swallows them all and thinks, _Tomorrow._ Let morning come, first.

Graves’s gaze wanders aimlessly over the papers on her table, but he doesn’t seem to take any of it in. He certainly doesn’t ask her anything and that, if nothing else, tells her a lot.

His clothes, she thinks, are his own, only some layers have gone missing, and they’re worse for wear. Injuries she can’t see, but she can guess at some later, after she’s come back with drinks they’re both desperately in need of. Two generous measures of firewhiskey that took her a little longer to pour than they should have; it turns out she still has something lodged behind her breastbone, a bubbly thing that steals a breath every time she doesn’t pay attention, and is trying to bustle its way out. It isn’t every day that the dead return and it’s real. Not because someone made a deal with a devil.

Graves has a bruise above his temple that disappears quickly into his hairline, one on his collarbone that disappears beneath his shirt, chapped lips and shadows under his eyes. She’s always liked the chiselled lines of his face, but right now there’s a sharpness to them that’s getting too much. _It’ll be fine_ , she thinks.

Of all possible times, this must be the worst for working any magic while he’s unaware, but Seraphina only considers not doing it for a fleeting moment. She takes advantage of the fact that he’s exhausted enough, and trusts her enough, to have all but fallen asleep on her settee during her interval of bartending; just a few basic spells to check.

It does bring him back around, almost instantly, but it was enough to tell her nothing’s seriously wrong, physically or magically, and she nudges a glass into the curl of his fingers before he can notice the echo of her spells too clearly. There are scrapes on his knuckles, scabbed but still an angry red: recent.

“Did you get into a fistfight with Grindelwald?”

She’s perched on the settee beside him, one leg tucked under, and leans across him propping her elbow on the backrest and her head on her hand.  

“That might be the thing to do that no one’s thought of.” Graves shifts a bit, to give her more space. They both just about manage to not drink back all of the whiskey at once; Seraphina, because she’s hoping the alcohol will settle the giddiness in her chest. It hardly feels disproportionate, but Graves came to her first, she suspects, because she isn’t prone to dramatic reactions, and she’ll try to give him time to breathe, if that’s what she can do right now.

And Graves, well.

“I had to Apparate blind the first few times.” He absently flexes his fingers, with a fleeting frown. “Forest and rocks everywhere. He threw my magic off somehow … some curse he must have strung together himself. Nothing I recognised. It felt like, I don’t know. Slush. It’s still a little strange.”

“I’m sorry,” Seraphina says. “For not noticing. Especially the second time. I’m sorry you had to do this alone.”

He gives her a look, _When did you get so sentimental?_ , but it’s got more of acknowledgement than teasing about it. 

“He made the spells iridescent. I watched him weave them. You’d have had to have known you were looking for it, to notice.”

Seraphina studies him and tries to imagine it. A corpse with his face and a perfect wickerwork of spells keeping everything in place. Like a book closing, _Fin_. Could he tell it was perfect? That no one would realise?

“What did he do to you?” she asks quietly, before she can remind herself she meant to let the night pass, and the Veritaserum wear off, first.

Graves looks across the room for a while, at the paintings on the wall between the hallway door and he dining room door: portraits of her grandparents, done by one of her grandfather’s artist friends in the almost-unmoving style of the mid-century Magical Realist school. Seraphina remembers the man coming to visit one day, when she was little and he quite old. _It’s all good and well, little spirit,_ he said to her, in the voice of an egret, _but it ain’t true. Time don’t wait, and a picture’s a picture, not a person. The magic lets us forget that sometimes, and I don’t know as it should_.

Graves runs a hand over his face and drinks down the rest of the whiskey.

“He tried to convince me of his ideas,” he says at length, voice even in a way that tells her he’s put these things into a tame form that doesn’t fit, no matter how much he wishes it would. “First with reason and then with force. He just wanted to use me. I think he meant to somehow let me go back to work after he’d done what he came to do, and make use of my position. He realised eventually it wasn’t going to play out that way. I’m not sure how he was going to get at my magic next, but apparently he wasn’t quite ready to kill me yet either. Or do irreversible damage.” He shrugs lightly. “So there’s that, I suppose.”

It makes sense, Seraphina thinks. She knows very few people who have the same kind of rapport with magic as Graves, and being able to tap into that, could only be alluring to Grindelwald; even if he couldn’t have the network of influence that attached to Graves’s position to boot. Or not straightforwardly.

She watches Graves’s consciousness begin to drift away again and wants to ask what, precisely, ‘force’ signified. But this time she reins in her questions for real, even while something heavy is settling in her stomach.

There’s no way Grindelwald played him that convincingly without having gained some access to this mind. That whatever Grindelwald tried, didn’t have the effect he wanted, doesn’t mean it had no effect.

Lightly, she taps the back of his hand with hers, and his eyelids flutter open. “Go get some sleep,” she says. And then, a little later: “I missed you.”

*

Merle stares at her bleary-eyed and bewildered. “What?” she asks, possibly hoping her sleep-addled ears misheard. When it turns out that they haven’t, she says, “We need the family’s consent, Ma’am.”

“Trust me,” Seraphina replies, “we don’t.”

Merle is right, in principle, of course. And the request must seem odd, not to say unnerving, in more than three ways. It’s the late night of March 8th, and President Picquery is asking her to exhume the body of the former Director of Magical Security right now.

“Please, Merle.” Seraphina doesn’t often do this. The value of observing the rules when one on occasion makes them, and always stands for them, is not lost on her, but nothing in the world works without compromise. She trusts a handful of people, and Merle is one of them, so tonight, Seraphina asks her to break the rules on trust. Merle sighs, and does.

An hour later, in the morgue, she’s dumbfounded. “This,” she says, “is very clearly not Director Graves.” Then, of all things, she asks: “What are we going to _do_ with him?”

That, Seraphina thinks, is a good question. Probably just put him someplace believable and anonymously tip off the NYPD, as they usually do when they come across a no-maj mess. Although they don’t commonly deposit the bodies themselves, of course. Rappaport’s Law produces odd effects at times.

Seraphina shakes her head. She can’t really believe any of this. She should impeach herself for gross incompetence.

Merle finds the file she’d already closed, and turns over and over the pages of the report she wrote not two months ago. “We noticed everything,” she says. “We just didn’t ask a single question about it.” She gestures at type Seraphina can’t see. “There was no magic in the body at all _because he’s a no-maj_. The preservation spell was to _keep the glamour from disintegrating_. I left some sections blank in this report.”

She sounds so offended, Seraphina nearly laughs, but here’s the sobering thought: _And_ _I signed it._

Out loud, she says, “Deflectors and White Rabbits.” The little add-ons that made them not wonder at all about what they saw; that led their thoughts elsewhere before they would even begin to attach to some detail or other. “All the curses were woven that densely to tie them properly in place.”

Merle blinks at the pages, and the corpse, and the pages. She looks crushed. This entire stunt, Seraphina thinks, couldn’t have done greater damage if Grindelwald had planned it precisely this way. MACUSA has become a house full of people believing they failed in ways they never should have.

She sighs. “One more favour, Merle. Keep this to yourself for now.”

This time, Merle only shrugs fatalistically. “Of course, Madam President.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Madam President? Might I have a word?”

Picquery looks like she hasn’t slept a wink since Tina last saw her late yesterday afternoon. She’s impeccably dressed, as usual; impeccable in a way that Tina can never seem to manage. Not on a normal day, and certainly not after a night of—work? Worrying? Tina suddenly wonders if, for all her confidence and clear-headedness, Seraphina Picquery sometimes spends her nights fretting, turning something over and over in her head, pacing, like mere mortals do. Her eyes certainly have an indication of it about them today.

Picquery glances up from the pile of papers on her desk that she’s leafing through standing up, like she just passed through her own office by chance, and all this mess caught her eye, but she never intended to really stop.

Tina can see the bright green print of urgent, unpleasant Congress business on more than one sheet of paper, although it seems Picquery sorted them all, or had Laurence sort them, into a single, purposely disorderly stack, and put them to the side. The corners of the papers twitch feebly, trying to stake their claim on the President’s undivided attention with some upset.

They’ll almost all pertain to, Tina hazards, the inquiry into Picquery’s approval of the use of an untested magical substance on the no-maj population of New York, and its distribution by a magical beast the size and strength of a small dragon. It seems to be never-ending. Taking the President in, Tina feels a stab of sympathy. At this point, the woman must be wishing above all else for Congress to just make up their minds, and let the chapter close.

“Goldstein. What is it?”

“I have a request, Madam President.”

Picquery arches an elegant eyebrow. “Another?”

Tina immediately flounders. She wishes she had learnt, somewhere along the way, to not loose confidence so easily in the presence of this woman. She’d been wondering about how to broach this subject with Picquery for the past few days. Knowing full well it was unlikely, she’d still almost begun to hope that the President really hadn’t paid enough attention, amidst the flurry of everything, to Jacob’s application. And hadn’t put the small matter of his naturalisation on the tally. Of course, she should have known better.

“How is Mr. Kowalski?” Picquery asks, smoothly and pointedly all at the same time.

Tina interlinks her fingers and tries to decide if this can be a trick question. Is there a wrong answer? Did she miss something? Carefully, she says, “It’s going well, Ma’am. He’s happy. My sister’s happy.” _What am I saying? You’re not interested in hearing that._

Picquery regards her with inscrutable eyes, in that manner many people take for haughtiness. Tina has never been entirely sure about that. She doesn’t think she sees annoyance, admonition, exasperation; only she can’t say what she does see, either.

“Take care that this pastry sculpting doesn’t get out of hand, Auror. It’s all good and well as long as the no-majs can put it down to a vivid imagination. But Mr. Kowalski can’t raise any kind of suspicion.”

“No, of course, Madam President. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it.” However would she do that? What’s a suspicious amount of imagination?

“What did you want, Goldstein?”

Tina takes a deep breath. She’s tried to think of ways to phrase this, that might, would, get her the response she so desperately needs. But rhetoric just really isn’t her forte. So she says it plainly.

“Your support, ma’am. It’s about Modesty Barebone.”

Picquery glances up at her, eyebrow raised again.

“I’ve been looking for her, and—”

“Goldstein.”

“She’s a witch, ma’am.”

The President releases her files back onto the leaning tower from whence they came, and steeples her fingers atop the smooth, rich wood of her desk.

“What makes you say so?”

“Well, for one, Mary Lou Barebone purposely adopted children with magical heritage so she could eradicate it in them. I don’t know if Chastity was the exception, but I’m certain about Modesty. I’ve been meeting with her, and I—”

“ _Goldstein_.”

“We have to help her, Madam President. We already failed Credence.”

Tina thinks she probably didn’t intend to put it like that. Definitely not, if she has any sense at all.

She more than half expects a harsh dismissal. She has no idea how Picquery feels about what happened with Credence: beginning with Tina’s interference with Mary Lou’s church and ending with the subway tunnel. But she knows for sure, and from experience, that there’s only one way the President can react to things like that; as well as to her incorrigible aurors calling her out on her decisions, if somewhat accidentally.

And so Picquery surprises her a little bit, now. She studies Tina intently, like she means to dissect her merely by looking; trying to figure out what on earth makes this irritating woman tick and act out like she still has any leeway to squander. But at length, the President sighs.

“What do you propose?”

“Modesty’s young enough to go to Ilvermorny,” Tina says immediately, before the opportunity can slip through her fingers. “If we could find someone to take her in until then, and teach her just enough of magic—”

The President raises a hand. “Modesty Barebone is officially a no-maj. We can’t just pick no-maj children off the streets, Goldstein.”

“But she isn’t a no-maj, ma’am! She’s one of ours. Surely we have to take care of our own?”

“Mary Lou Barebone’s adoption policy is hardly sufficient proof of the girl’s magical heritage.”

“No, I know. But she has her birthmother’s wand. She showed it to me. I held it in my hands, ma’am, I could feel that it’s real.” Tina realises she’s racing through the sentences, as if getting them out fast will propel them through whatever closing doors there are in Picquery’s mind. Forcing herself to slow down, she insists, “She comes from a magical family.”

Picquery appraises her, and sighs inaudibly, but visibly. “Very well, Tina,” she says at last, and Tina wants to jump for joy. “Find out who her mother was, then, and prove that she’s our responsibility. _If and when_ you’ve done that, we’ll talk about this again.” ~~~~

_Don’t jump_ , Tina thinks, _or squeal._

“Thank you, Madam President,” she says, with dignity. She makes to leave before Picquery can for some reason change her mind again, but almost out the door, she stops and turns around again.

“And thank you, ma’am,” she says. “For Jacob.”

“That’ll be all, Goldstein,” Seraphina replies, without looking up again. All the lines are blurring, she thinks; so fast, it’s making her dizzy. She doesn’t know anymore if she’s making mistakes. She used to be better able to tell when it was all right to act on instinct, and when she needed to put reason and the rules above that.

When Tina has gone, she only briefly contemplates returning to all the pressing concerns and problems that have accumulated on her desk like extremely hysterical dust; and decides against it.

“Laurence,” she says, and her secretary sticks his head in at the door. “Something’s come up. I’ll be away for a few hours.”

Laurence has perfected the art of displaying an entirely composed countenance, and speaking in a perfectly matter-of-course tone, even when on the inside he’s weeping in the face of the things his boss throws at him. “I’ll clear your schedule, ma’am.”

* 

Back in Savannah, Seraphina listens to the house. It has always been talkative, murmuring to itself. It’s the spirits of the earth that it was built on, and memories that have burrowed into the wood beams. Usually, she hardly notices it. It’s familiar, comforting, and almost always very quiet. It’s quiet today, too.

As she walks past, she closes the dining room windows with a sweep of her hand. She has an idea why they’re open, and the spring breeze is fresh, gentle; but it’s just still too cool this year.

She stops in the doorway through to the library, a fair-sized room, charmed here and there to accommodate a few more books, scrolls, and pictures, than mundanely manageable, but not overly so. She’s always liked it better that way: private, not grand. There’s enough grandeur at MACUSA to last anyone a lifetime.

Graves has a book in his hand, but closed, like he picked it up for its solidness rather than diversion. She recognises it as the same one she was reading last time she spent an idle hour here, and left on the filigree walnut table between the chaise longue and one of the well-used chairs; although she can’t recall now what it was. If Graves was reading it at all, he seems to have stopped a while ago.

Seraphina leans on the doorframe and says, “I unburied our John Doe.”

Graves raises his eyes. “And?”

In the clear, cool daylight, he looks worse than he did last night, with shadows and lamplight mitigating. Seraphina supposes she might have expected that.

She shrugs. “It isn’t you.”

She pushes herself away from the doorframe and walks over to sit across from him. All the furniture is angled towards the French windows that open out onto the porch, and to the garden, green grass and redbuds, wild olives, and the white oak with the wind chimes in its branches. It’s the most grounding view Seraphina can imagine.

“Merle was worried I’d finally lost it for a while there, I think. Understandably so, at two o’clock in the morning.” She leans back. Just thinking of the sleepless night suddenly lets her feel the tiredness of it. Not that sleepless nights don’t happen continually on this job, but she really should know by now that it’s never a good idea to sit down.

“I don’t know why I thought it couldn’t wait. I guess I wanted to be done with it.”

Graves studies her, but says nothing. Did she still need to make sure? Perhaps. In the way you sometimes have to pinch yourself and see what happens. She thinks that, in that way, perhaps she needed to break the strange, immaterial spell that it had over her, knowing that someone she’d thought was him, was still buried under a tombstone with his name on it. It’d felt eerie; more wrong now that she knew the truth, instead of less so.

She’s well aware Merle may have unwittingly had a point in suspecting Seraphina of a spot of absurdity.

She resists the urge to shake her head at herself and instead says: “Merle’s the only one who knows, for now. But I can’t draw it out much longer.”

Graves sighs. “I know.” He reminds her the slightest bit, just then, of the petulant boy he could sometimes be, when she first got to know him at Ilvermorny. Not half as comfortable then, and not nearly as unconcerned, with the expectations that the inheritance of his name carried

Something about the recollection sits jarringly in her chest. She puts it down to everything else, the last sixteen-or-so hours, and brushes it aside.

“How are you doing?”

“Ask something else.”

“All right. How did you get away from him?”

Graves purses his lips, not without humour. “I thought I said not to ask me that, either.”

“You did. But that was yesterday, and you caught me at a weak moment. Grace period’s over.”

He smiles, but he clearly isn’t eager to answer, and takes his time. A couple of lapwings chase each other through the garden, and Graves traces them with the kind of expression usually worn by people basking lazily in the sun, hooded eyes and relaxed features.

“I honestly don’t know, Sera,” he says eventually. “He’s the most idiosyncratic magician I’ve ever met. Almost everything a little above ordinary spellwork, he does his own way. With some clauses grafted on, or a caveat, or some chiasm …” He waves a hand, _et cetera_. “Fortunately, there’s a pattern even to that. And you know how quickly the structure cracks when you turn the wrong two words around. I just got lucky. He didn’t notice he’d made a mistake before I did. That’s all.”

He rubs his eyes. “I didn’t duel him. I waited till he’d left me alone, chipped away at the crack until it was wide enough, and then Disapparated.”

Seraphina watches him, not caring that he can probably read her thoughts plainly on her face: _That’s all. Luck. Coincidence._ She’s never been foolish enough to underestimate either of those two factors. But they make for such thin lines. They’ve both had plenty of experience of this over the years, split seconds or hair’s breadths that make all the difference. But she can’t keep herself from acknowledging the thin line between this, _library afternoon talk_ , and no one ever being the wiser.

“And then?”

“Then,” Graves says, “I ran into Newt Scamander.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of this chapter is a flashback that may read a little weirdly. That’s because, initially, the flashback was in its proper chronological place, but that created a bit too much repetition for my liking, so I threw it out while it was still unfinished. Then I went and finished it anyway, and got attached. So I stuck it back in. And that’s all the apology I have. I’m sorry?
> 
> There’s some verbatim repetition at the beginning, which I’ve italicised so it’s easier so skip.
> 
> And while I’m talking, I’d also like to say a big Thank You to all you lovely people who leave kudos or comment. You guys really are the best!! ♥

_While Tina is making paper birds in Battery Park, Newt, on a fading afternoon in early March, is crouching beside an old juniper on a shingly hillside in the Outer Hebrides, chafing his hands for warmth._

_“See,” he whispers to Pickett, “see, right over there. Can you see it?” Newt is almost certain Pickett can’t see anything that far away, but he’s still so tense with excitement, he might as well be just a twig Newt stuck in his buttonhole. Bowtruckles. Surprisingly empathetic. It makes Newt smile._

_But then something pulls on his line of vision, and he whispers, Shhh now, because he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. Not a Keelut. The Keelut bolt._

_Newt holds his breath, and scans the heather, the tree line, the spaces between the rocks that dot the hillside like something that slipped through a hole in some giant’s pocket as he meandered past._

_He can’t see anything._

_This has happened a few times now: he’s always sure there’s something there, but when he tries to look, it’s gone. Like some trick of the light, only he doesn’t believe it’s something wrong with his vision, because he isn’t the only one who notices: the animals do, too, and everything around him. It’s like the quiet of this region, the quiet of nature left to itself, of jagged rock, cold air, and empty land, deepens to a silence; breathless and frozen, like something petrified._

_Newt waits, unmoving like everything around him, going in his mind through all the catalogue of creatures he knows, hoping for a match. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s acquired a stowaway, and he knows that one drawback of his suitcase certainly is the sheer amount of magic it necessarily concentrates within itself. To some beings, it’s like a will-o’-the-wisp as bright as a beacon._

_A breeze sweeps in from where the island crests and plunges down to the sea some distance off, and the hush is broken. Newt sighs, and peers down at Pickett, who looks back at him, just as puzzled._

_Then it happens again: movement in the corner of his eye, only this time, he realises almost immediately that it’s different. This time, when he looks, the thing doesn’t disappear._

_Newt shrinks back behind the leaning trunk of the juniper, and squints, trying to make out what just appeared out of nowhere about a hundred feet from him. He hesitates. Curiosity killed the cat, as Theseus never tires of reminding him, but he thinks, he thinks that’s a person he’s seeing, someone Apparated, but this is very far north, and very remote, and very uninteresting terrain, for someone other than him to just be here._

_So he ignores his better judgement and approaches slowly, quietly, while Pickett disappears into the fold of his scarf._

Newt learned long ago to move silently, but he clearly isn’t being sneaky enough.

The man looks up at him when he’s still some fifty feet away, and watches him, as though this were a busy London street and Newt just one of many passers-by. But when Newt comes closer, he lifts his hands, just enough to signal that he has no wand, and, perhaps, no intention to attack or fight. He is pale and dark-haired, dark-eyed.

Newt stops, perplexed, with a few paces left between them and his fingers tight around his wand.

“I—,” he says, after some moments during which his brain tries and fails to make reasonable sense of this. “Attended your funeral.”

Percival Graves studies him for just a beat. If Newt is having some trouble deciding how to act, so, perhaps, is he. Somewhat unexpectedly, he says, “I appreciate the gesture.” And then: “Although I’m not sure we’ve met?”

“No. But my brother knows you. And I’m friends with Tina. Goldstein.” _This is not what Theseus would do_ , Newt thinks. What would Theseus do now?

“Well,” Graves says. His voice sounds hollowed out to a husk. “What are the odds?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re Theseus Scamander’s younger brother, I think?”

“Yes.” Newt rolls his wand between his fingers to feel the comfort of the familiar, smooth wood and the magic, reliable, just on the other side of it. “What gave it away?” He tries to mistrust. Something is making it difficult.

Graves looks away, into the trees that cluster nearby, and become a forest further on. “I wish I could say it’s just the family resemblance and the bowtruckle, but mostly it’s what I’ve been told about the events in New York ….” He drifts off and glances up at the sky, as though he finds it suspicious how it’s darkening. “By Grindelwald.”

 _I would make a terrible auror,_ Newt thinks. “I see. Well, excuse me. Revelio.”

He casts every charm and spell he can think of, that would undo any disguise, and a Finite Incantatem, and Graves does nothing to stop him. More importantly, his face doesn’t change. “That leaves polyjuice,” Newt murmurs, but he thinks he knows just what vevin verim will do.

He lets his wand sink to his side. “So you’re saying … Grindelwald first transfigured himself to pose as you, and then, when we’d uncovered the ruse, he transfigured some unfortunate—”

“Some unfortunate no-maj he snatched off the street. To look like me, yes,” Graves finishes. His gaze slips away again. Heather forest sky forest. “Too many missing people in New York,” he says absently.

“Where is he? Grindelwald?”

Graves looks back at him. “Mr. Scamander. I could use your help. Are you going to help me?”

 _Are you working with him? How did you get here?_ Here _, of all places._ Graves waits. He says nothing else, and does nothing, and it comes across as a strange kind of calm that Newt can’t rightly label. But there’s urgency in his eyes, appearing suddenly, the same way he himself did minutes ago. It’s contagious.

Newt tries, yet again, to imagine what Theseus would do, or Tina. But these are the Outer Hebrides and there’s no one here for miles except Pickett, so Newt really has only his own gut feeling to go on.

“I’ve been renting a room at a place about twenty miles from here. I’ll Side-Along you. All right?”

Graves breathes out. “More than.”

*

Graves doesn’t land quite steadily when they Apparate in Newt’s gabled upstairs room, and that’s certainly saying something.

  
As soon as they both have solid floorboards under their feet, Newt takes a few steps back on instinct; he isn’t sure if he does it for his own sake, or Graves’s.

The oil lamps breathe to life at a whisper of magic, and Graves scans the room swiftly; there isn’t much to take in. It’s sparsely furnished, and bears few marks of Newt’s stay. His Keelut notes are spread out on the table in one of the bays, next to this morning’s tea cup, but most things, he’s used to leaving in his workshop in the suitcase when he travels. It’s just more convenient that way.

Graves seems a little more at ease with walls around him instead of open space, but Newt can’t really guess much beyond that from his body language: he holds himself quite calmly, poised, but that might indicate any number of things, and Newt supposes that, at any rate, it’s too late to worry about that, now.

So he says, “I admittedly know a lot more about creatures than humans, but I do have all kinds of potions downstairs, so—”

“I’m fine, Mr. Scamander,” Graves says, “thank you. I’m not hurt.”

Newt raises an eyebrow at the streak of blood that runs like a bold brushstroke from Graves’s forehead to his jaw. Graves seems to notice it only then, touching his fingertips to his temple. “Not seriously,” he amends.

“All right.” Newt shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Just some vevin verim, then?” he asks lightly, like it’s some cordial he’s suggesting.

Graves looks at him as if for a moment he can’t remember what that was about; then he says, “Yes, just some of that.” It sounds almost amused, and Newt thinks that if for him this situation is somewhat unusual, for Graves it must be unnerving.

Newt summons the vial of vevin verim from his case, unwilling to let Graves out of his sight just yet. Although the tincture does precisely what he expected (hoped) it would do: nothing.

He offers Graves water, which the man seems grateful for. Newt notices that his hands are shaking, almost imperceptibly. The windowpanes have turned to slate by now, like the outside world’s a secret they’re jealously guarding. Graves studies them anyway.

“The room’s warded,” Newt offers. “We’re quite safe here.”

“You realise that Grindelwald is somewhere on this island.”

“I’d gathered that, yes.”

Graves smooths his hair back; it falls back in his eyes almost immediately. “He messed with my magic. I don’t have enough right now to draw up any more defences. Let alone fight him, if it came to that.”

That, Newt had somewhat suspected, too. He felt how weak Graves’s magic was when he Apparated them both here; he wonders how the man managed to Apparate on his own earlier at all, without severely injuring himself.

“Let’s hope it won’t, then.”

Graves looks across at him with an expression that reminds Newt a lot of Theseus, years ago, when his brother (much in contrast to their parents) was beginning to understand that Newt’s commitment to magical fauna was not some thing of whimsy, or even rebellion, but one of love and courage.

“We should have a few hours. Perhaps even a day or two, but I wouldn’t want to count on that.”

“Well then.” Newt risks a smile, and gestures towards the bed in the corner. “You could use some rest, I think. I’ll be downstairs in my workshop—I’ve recently put new wards on the case as well, they’re calibrated to alert me if anything magical so much as comes near. I set them up with my creatures in mind, so you really can trust me when I say this place is safe.”

Graves laughs a little. “I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Scamander.”

*

Newt doesn’t sleep much that night. His thoughts keep swimming to Tina.

He wants to write her a letter this minute, _Guess what—_ Because he knows she took it hard, what happened, what they all believed had happened, to Graves. He knows the search for Grindelwald is wearing her out, her and everyone around her.

But he’s also very much aware that this is anything but a straightforward case of, _Found it!_ , and the safest thing may be to sit still, if just for a moment. So he does.

He writes down Keelut thoughts in the glow of a perpetual sunset that filters in through the workshop window, and finishes edits on the entries for thunderbirds and pixies. He plays with the mooncalves for a while, and helps the diricawl search for one of her chicks that she misplaced. It turns out the chick has something of a cold, and keeps Apparating itself all across the case with every sneeze.

He checks his wards constantly, but the only things that register are benign, and familiar to Newt. After some hours, he quietly climbs the ladder out of his suitcase; a little unsure if he should or shouldn’t. So eventually he just does.

Graves looks exhausted, haunted in sleep, and he looks at best marginally less so in the morning, when Newt emerges from the case to find him already awake. It would have surprised him far less if Graves had slept past noon, from the way he seemed the night before; though when he thinks about it, Newt supposes this really makes more sense.

All through the three days they spend together, Graves sleeps little. He’s pale and calm and watchful, like the things that have happened, that Newt still knows nothing, and doesn’t ask, about, were quite neatly in the past, and never pulling on Graves’s mind like dark little creatures trying to ladder a tapestry.

It’s training ingrained bone-marrow-deep, Newt recognises it from Theseus; but he doesn’t want to know what it’s like inside Graves’s head, what the days and nights and hours feel like to him. He’s clearly at the end of his rope, but he doesn’t let himself rest beyond the bare necessary minimum, because he can’t.

He must be paranoid, but if Newt knew nothing at all about him, and Grindelwald, he wouldn’t suppose it. Newt can see why Graves used to hold the position he did. Why his peers scowled at the funeral, and his aurors grieved.

“I could show you around, if you wanted,” Newt says now, on the first morning. He gestures towards his case. Outside, it’s slowly getting light. The landscape is earth and stone colours, and everything looks dusty.

Graves smiles. “Aren’t most magical creatures exceptionally sensitive to moods? I’d probably spook them all. So perhaps some other time.”

“They _are_ very perceptive,” Newt concedes.

Graves turns back to the window; always watching the windows. He’s cleaned up as much as circumstances allowed; the blood is washed away, and the dust of the Hebridean winter forests.

“What brings you out here, Mr. Scamander?”

“Oh, field work. Research for a book I’m writing, on magical creatures? I came to study Keelut.”

“I thought Keelut were native to Alaska.”

“They are. But I kept hearing rumours that a small population had migrated, at some point over the last few decades. ‘Migration’ being a euphemism for trafficking, I’d wager. There’s so much nonsense in circulation about their blood and what it does to people. Who drink it, that is. Mostly, it makes them sick, of course, but people will rather believe that _that_ ’s the lie, than the bit where the blood overrides the exceptions to Gamp’s Law. I’ve studied a population in Alaska, too, but it’s terribly interesting to see what a different environment has to say about them, in a manner of speaking, you know?”

Graves hums. “Have you spotted any?”

“ _Spotted_ , yes. But they’re as difficult to get reasonably close to as it is to find them in the first place. They’re very shy, and very good at concealing themselves.”

“In the snow, I thought? What with being all white? Don’t they stand out a bit around here?”

Newt grins. “That’s one of the exciting bits. They’re more of a fawn colour over here, but I haven’t been able to determine if that’s simple biological adaptation, or if they’re actually able to mimic their surroundings.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t have expected you to know this much about magical creatures.” 

“I don’t. This was the extent of my knowledge about Keelut.”

“Still more than most people.”

“Well. Then I suppose we’re in dire need of your book.”

Newt listens for the hint of irony he’s well and truly used to; but if it’s there, it’s well-hidden.

Then Graves disappears into the nook behind the precariously leaning wardrobe, because Mrs. Sandilands the landlady’s steps sound on the stairs outside the door. Chipper as ever, she brings Newt’s breakfast of toast, bilberry jam, and tea; most days, Newt has spent chewing on one triangle of bread while feeding some to whoever came up to him down in case, and packing the remainder for later; he isn’t much of a breakfast person, an ill that Jacob has already vowed to cure.

Today, Newt has his usual chat with Mrs. Sandilands, about the weather (“There’s a storm comin’, laddie, dornt bide it tay long.”), the hurt paw of one of her two very elderly crups (improving daily), and the ghost of her late husband, who’s all in all an agreeable spirit, but won’t leave the stamp collection alone.

Newt does his best to usher her out of the room again just a little sooner than he normally would, and then tries to get Graves to eat the toast, because surely it can only do him good; he seems about as enthusiastic about it as Newt generally is about breakfast, but accepts tea gladly enough.

He has a look of shellshock about him, Newt thinks; he’s seen it often enough in the war, and since. Bright eyes, strange calm. It’s hardly surprising, of course, but it makes Newt wonder just how dangerous this situation is, and precisely in what ways.

He pours milk into the mug he Summoned from the workshop, and asks, “Do you take an interest in magical creatures?”

Graves inclines his head, but Newt isn’t immediately sure if by that he means _Yes_ or _Hardly_. He keeps turning the tea cup in his hands, incrementally. At long last, he says: “My family’s always kept all kinds of animals. Dogs, birds, horses, what have you. Just mundane creatures, but there used to be magical ones. A few generations back, before the ownership laws came into effect. Great-great-uncle Lionel would have been your kind of guy. His personal diary is mostly just the exploits of all his magical pets. A lot of it was fairly absurd, so the whole family’s read it. But he seems to have had a genuine interest in understanding them. Hence my marginal knowledge of beasts.”

“Do you keep pets now?”

Graves chuckles, because the questions starts out as one of simple curiosity, but on the very last syllable slips up a pitch as Newt presumably realises that whatever pet there might be, _might_ have been on its own for about three months now, and, if so, would probably have long since starved.

“Not at my house, no. I’m not there enough. I have a horse, but she’s stabled at my parents’ estate. And Falaq, he’s there, too.”

“Who’s Falaq?”

“My Saker. I wouldn’t be keeping one now, but he was given to me as a gift. From Fahed al-Hakeem, when he first visited the States as Vizier. Some years ago.”

“You fly falcons?”

Graves nods slowly. “Family tradition. Begun by some ancestor, back in Ireland. Before my famous great-great-and-so-forth.” He brushes the lineage away with a wave of his hand before curling his pale fingers back around the tea cup. “The lessons learnt in training a bird of prey are part of growing up in my family. Patience, attention to detail. Inevitability. That sort of thing. The irrefutable fact of our insignificance, no matter how important we’d like to believe ourselves to be.”

“Oh. That’s…” Newt isn’t quite sure what. He knows almost nothing about Graves’s family, and the word he’s looking for might be _bleak_ or _gentle_ with equal probability. But the concept certainly sounds quite alien to him: turning animals into lessons. Newt’s learnt a lot from his creatures, for sure, much more than from any person he’s ever met; but reducing them, purposing them to it, strikes him as presumptuous.

A bit randomly, he says, “I saw your parents. At the funeral.”

Graves doesn’t respond to that. He turns away again, towards the window, and Newt has no way of guessing if this was a wrong thing to say, perhaps. If he hit some kind of nerve, or caused grief. He doesn’t find out.

“You know there’s someone following you?”

“Ah, yes. For a while, I think, although I don’t know for how long exactly. But they never come close, so I think perhaps—”

“You think perhaps they’re just tracking you to pass the time?” Graves raises an eyebrow at him, and smiles. He smiles a lot, all considered. He seems much more openly kind, easier to interact with, just _easier_ , than Newt would have thought.

“Well, no. I assumed it was a beast. The magic of the case draws them in sometimes, but they’re often too shy to come really close. I can’t imagine why someone would follow me. I spend whole days sitting under a camouflage charm staring at the same spot between two firs.”

“You were centrally involved in a major international incident not too long ago,” Graves says mildly. He looks outside again, eyes narrowed. “It’s something powerful.”

“It is?”

“Can’t you tell?” Graves looks back at him, and, seeing Newt quite meant it, shakes his head. “I used to wonder if your brother was being over-protective, but you do get too caught up in your work to notice much else, don’t you?”

That’s when Newt decides he likes Percival Graves. Because he said that with a teasing sort of kindness, and entirely without condescension; even though he’s one of the most skilled aurors of the age, if Theseus’s judgement is anything to go by, and Newt’s approach to the situation probably makes his hair stand on end, quite regardless of the fact that Newt’s approach is also benefitting him to no inconsiderable extent at the moment.

“I didn’t know your friendship with Theseus was quite so close.”

Graves shrugs lightly. “We get along well. We dislike the same people on the ICW, one bonds. It’s curiously easy sometimes to talk about fairly personal things when you know you understand one another in some other important ways.”

Newt hums. “He did say in his last that he didn’t like having to adjust to, ah … Periwinkle, is it?”

Graves looks at him for a long moment, and Newt realises belatedly that _that_ may have been a jolting thing to drop on Graves without warning. It’s not that he worries Graves may have had any illusions about his job back at MACUSA. But it’ll hardly have been the most immediate or urgent thing on his mind over the past months, and Newt’s mention of Periwinkle can only have been a reminder of a whole other mess that still lies ahead. What, Newt wonders, does Graves’s life look like to him from where he’s standing right now?

“She’s a good choice,” Graves says at length. “I’m surprised the President went for her, though. They can’t agree on the time of day, most days.” He pauses, then nods towards the window, and the world outside. “It’s like a beacon, Mr. Scamander. You can’t—” He breaks off abruptly.

“Mr. Graves?”

For the first time, Graves turns his back on the windows completely. He looks past Newt, at something unremarkable, nothing at all in particular, in the corner of the room. And looks like he’s just seen a ghost. “I hardly believed Grindelwald when he said Credence Barebone was an obscurial. It’s unheard of. Isn’t it?”

Newt blinks. “I don’t know of another case like his, no.”

“Do you believe he survived, too?”

“Too?”

“Grindelwald does. He’s still looking for him.”

“Oh.” _Oh._ “We’d … come to believe we’d been mistaken. In the subway tunnel. We thought we saw something—just a wisp. Tina and I, and her sister, that is. But time passed and it seemed less and less likely.”

Graves nods absently. “How long have you been here for?”

“Two weeks and change? You think it’s Credence. Who’s been following me.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” He thinks of Tina, with a flutter in his chest that for once as nothing to do with her alone. _Guess what._ “Then we have to somehow draw him closer and—”

“No. Mr. Scamander.” Graves is shaking his head, and puts down his teacup on the windowsill. He runs both hands through his hair, and suddenly looks every bit as beat again as he did the night before, out on the heather. “I think it just became very clear that it was no coincidence our paths crossed here. Grindelwald still wants an obscurus. Credence is the only obscurial he knows of. He’s tracking Credence, and, by extension, you.”

That, Newt vaguely thinks, is not a comfortable thought. But. “But we failed him once already. He needs our help. What becomes of him if Grindelwald gets to him?”

“You can’t risk it. We can’t risk it. Not like this.”

Newt hesitates, and thinks of the weariness in Tina’s letters, _There’s just no leads, nothing, no one knows where to start looking, it’s driving everyone crazy_ , and he says, “I’ve caught him once before. It was for everyone’s shock at realising he’d been impersonating you, that he got away, not for lack of Swooping Evil mucus.”

Unexpectedly, Graves grins. “Is that what happened?”

And Newt thinks, _Right._ Grindelwald would probably have glossed over that part.

Graves’s expression sobers. He seems to consider the whole matter for a moment, but then he shakes his head once more. “I just don’t have a fight in me right now, Mr. Scamander, least of all against someone like Grindelwald. That means there’s too many liabilities in this one for you.”

Newt thinks of the subway tunnel. And imagines a Grindelwald who doesn’t have half his attention on an indomitable obscurus; and no Tina, no MACUSA appearing on the scene to give him something to do. He thinks of the whipping curses like waves of an avalanche, knocking the air out of his lungs quicker than he could draw breath, pinning him to the rails and gnawing at the edges of his consciousness.

“All right,” he says. “All right. But what about Credence?”

“If Grindelwald had located him definitively, he’d be here by now. I’m not sure how far I Apparated, but I did put some distance between us. We leave now, Credence will follow you. Go somewhere crowded, where identifying one single signature isn’t as easy as it is out here. Somewhere with a portkey connection to the States, preferably,” he finishes wryly.

Newt nods. “Edinburgh it is.”

\------------

“Goldstein told me you’d been keeping an eye on the Barebone boy,” Seraphina says. At the time, she dipped her head to hide a smile; and thought, _Of course_.

Now, again, she has to laugh. Graves gives her a questioning look.

“She came to me, earlier today. About Modesty Barebone. She says the girl’s a witch. She’s trying to help her.”

“Of course she is.”

Seraphina shakes her head. _Peas in a pod_. “I put Goldstein back on the investigative team.”

“Good. That’s where she belongs.”

Seraphina smiles, and picks up her cup. She fetched them coffee some time ago; made with spices, the way she learned long ago on a trip to the Middle East, and so strong it might as well be Wiggenweld Potion. In other words, something Seraphina needs frequently.

Graves hasn’t touched his own cup all that much, which is mildly worrying. Although it may mostly be his preference for a plain American blend over what he’s once or twice called her ‘arabesque brew.’ He’ll usually drink it anyway, though.

Seraphina interlinks her fingers around her cup.

“Did you know?”

“That Credence Barebone was an obscurial? No. I wouldn’t have thought it possible even if it had crossed my mind that it might be him.”

Seraphina frowns. “But you knew it was an obscurus that was causing the disturbances?”

“I suspected it might be. I—” He worries his bottom lip with his teeth, the way he very seldom does. “—saw something.”

Seraphina keeps frowning. Then the penny drops.

Graves isn’t even looking at her, but she can tell by the way the corner of his mouth curls into an entirely mirthless smile, that he knows she’s caught on. She wants to reach over and touch him, but doesn’t.

Instead, she asks, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had a feeling it was too soon. Not a very reliable feeling, evidently. I only saw that Credence was somehow involved with what’d been happening in the city. I thought that with his help, I could find out where it came from; and bring in MACUSA to contain it before it got out of hand, once I knew for sure. Credence was scared and skittish, I thought he’d spook if he realized an entire government was interested in him.” He pauses.

Seraphina hates that the bitterness has also crept into his voice. It happens so easily in this line of work, that it settles unnoticed one day, and never leaves. She’s watched people crumble around it.

“So actually,” Graves goes on, “I don’t know _what_ I was thinking. Involving a civilian in something of that magnitude. A teenage boy.”

Seraphina sighs. It’s not that she doesn’t understand; not that she hasn’t thought these exact same words a good hundred times, _A teenage boy_. But that way lies heartbreak.

“We always think the same thing,” she says: “Whatever it takes to protect the community. I suppose all that can be said is, it’s lucky for both of us that Credence Barebone got out of there alive, after all.”

Graves looks at her. “Lucky, yes,” he replies. “I’m more worried about him than us and our conscience.”

 _All right,_ Seraphina thinks. _That, I can handle._ She’s always been better when there were things she could do, instead of only things to be said.

Of course, this is a secret very few people know about the president of MACUSA.

She taps the side of her cup with her fingertip. It’s a tell. Tapping things she has in her hands.

“Did you see anything else?”

“No. That was the only time.”

“That must have been interesting to Grindelwald,” Seraphina muses. MACUSA had established, by a strategy of educated guessing peppered with some solid evidence, that Grindelwald must have been attracted to New York by the rumours of something powerful, something out of the ordinary, on the loose, carried to him by his followers in the city. Many of whom they’ve arrested and questioned, in the meantime; they’ve done that, at least.

But Graves’s vision must have led Grindelwald to Credence Barebone. And then, Shaw, Goldstein. Scamander: obscurus.

“It was,” Graves says bleakly. Just talking about it seems to make him more tired. “He’s evidently a seer. But you can’t control what you see. Not like that, at any rate. So he’d have liked to look through my eyes, as it were.”

 _How?_ Seraphina wants to ask, but swallows the word. A battalion of people will be asking that question soon enough, and she doesn’t have to be the first to hear an answer.

His visions are rare, almost always pale and fleeting, like tricks of the light. At least that’s how he described them to her once. But she knows how he feels about them, how he’d rather not acknowledge them at all. He must be dreading the thought of revealing them before a room full of people.

The summer of 1902 comes back to her again: the afternoons, nights down by the marshes, until it got late enough to make her mother angry, the way caring parents get angry: gently and earnestly. Cora never understood her daughter’s love for the marshes, populated by hinkypunks and jack-o’-lanterns, whispers and ghosts; and veined with bleached boundaries. _If you let it get too late for too long,_ she said, _you’ll end up losing something instead of finding it, Sera._

Seraphina wishes she could dial back the clock to that summer. Young as they were, she’d know better how to help her friend, if they were just school kids again.

As it is, they’re not children anymore, and it’s the immediate future that she has to focus on; so she pushes memories away and says: “This is the first lead worth the name that we’ve had on Grindelwald since he fled New York. I have to tell Congress.” _And the aurors_. They’re footsore from running in circles and dizzy from hitting walls.

In fact, she has to tell the whole magical world. _Where is Grindelwald?_ has become a perpetual headline to make anyone forget what month it is.

But, like earlier, when she first brought up the topic of the ticking clock, Graves says, “I know.” And leaves it at that.

He combs his fingers through his hair and looks out at the garden again. The light has turned paler, and the olives are shivering. It’ll be raining within the hour.

Seraphina sets her cup back down on the walnut table, and reaches for Graves’s wand in the inside pocket of her coat, where she smuggled it out of Woolworth just before she came here. She holds it out to him.

If she didn’t know him as well as she does, she’d have missed both the heartbeat’s hesitation before he takes it, and the breath of relief when he does.

Admittedly, Graves’s has to be the most opinionated wand she’s ever held in her hands. It was still seething with outrage when they screened it, at having been made to do the bidding of such a one as Grindelwald. She’s always thought it said a lot about Graves that this wand should be so smooth and willing, tame and ready in his hands. And of course it says something. All wands talk a mile a minute about their owners.

Ebony and dragon heartstring: _steadfast, courageous, strong-willed, true_. It never crossed her mind to wonder if the wand might have withdrawn its allegiance. But the same evidently isn’t true for Graves.

“We found it with the body,” Seraphina says. “It was still locked up in evidence because forensics kept insisting they’d find a way to draw some kind of information from it that might lead us to Grindelwald. Your mother wasn’t happy.” But the wand was the only definitive record they had of Grindelwald’s activities in New York while everyone believed him to be Graves. Every spell and hex and curse he’d cast, right down to the Imperius.

Graves rolls the wand between his fingertips. “You abstracted evidence for me? That’s both outrageous and touching.”

“Shut up,” Seraphina returns fondly.

For a minute or two, they both fall silent. She studies the lines on his face, the ones that have appeared over the years and remind her how long they’ve known one another; and the bruises and the shadows beneath his eyes, that look like the past three months cast into colour.

“What are you worried about?” she asks.

“I’m not worried. I’m …”

 _Tired_ , Seraphina supplies.

“Dead,” Graves says. “And not sure how to handle it.”

The laugh is almost startled out of her. She isn’t sure yet why, but something about the moment feels like relief. “Well, I think we’ll just have to figure that one out as we go. I can’t think of a precedent, off the top of my head.”

“No, me neither.”

There’s a faint knock, then another, then a dozen more: the beginnings of the spring shower. Graves ducks his head a little, to see past the frieze and the scrollwork of the porch, and find the sky. “Catching Grindelwald might be a good place to start.”

Seraphina smiles. “Might be.” She tucks an escaped strand of hair back under her headscarf. “Come on, now. Drink the fucking coffee.” ~~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vevin verim as an antidote to polyjuice is stolen from photojourney’s "The Crossing," which I love to bits and pieces and which I would happily link here, if it hadn’t disappeared.


	7. Chapter 7

If somebody were to force Tina at wand-point to name an advantage to Queenie having gone to live with Jacob, she supposes she could say that she can now stay at work well into the small hours without feeling guilty about it.

Not that Queenie ever meant to make her feel bad: she just worried. The number of times that she’s said, in the morning after Tina worked too late for dinner, and didn’t have time for breakfast, either— _Teen, you’ll end up like the President, or like Graves. It’s all good and well, you know? Putting everything into protecting people. But it’s got to be so lonely when that’s all there is._ Every time, Tina laughed, and said, _Lucky, then, that I’ve got you_. Every time, Queenie just made her take some toast to eat on the way to work, and let it go.

When the sun rises in the atrium of Woolworth this morning, Tina looks up from the stacks of yesterday’s news papers on her desk, and in a sort of woolly way thinks that she should probably really get home, and change, before O’Brien, who’s her sergeant after all, or, Merlin forbid, Periwinkle, see her like this: rumpled from head to toe, crooked-backed, and clearly sleep-deprived.

Definitely before she meets Queenie and Jacob for lunch today, or she’ll hear one of her sister’s gentle lectures anyway, new living arrangements notwithstanding.

She sighs, and wrinkles her nose. Her first thought is, _Coffee_ , because coffee helps with most things, but undoubtedly it would be more effective in this case to brush her teeth and wash her face. With some reluctance, she packs her project into a folder and ties it closed.

The first thing she did, after her conversation with the President, and the end of her shift yesterday, was to go to the house where Modesty had lived until Mary Lou snatched her up. She went over every inch of split floorboard and turned over every shard of plaster, searched between the bricks and the dusty skeletons of left-behind furniture, hoping to find proof of magic. But she could hardly discover remnants of past everyday lives among the debris, let alone trace amounts of magic, or anything else that might help her case.

So she next asked around in the neighbourhood until she found someone who knew the landlord’s name. The man was grumpy, clearly both suspicious of and offended by a woman in pants, and evidently had nothing in his life that he cared about less than a decrepit building in his possession, with the one exception of the people who had at one point or other lived there. The name that Tina repeated five times to him— _Christina who?—Christabel Reinhart, Mr. Scrimmige._ —produced no particular recollection. He left her exchanging long-suffering looks with his dog while he grudgingly went to retrieve a battered cardboard box that contained a handful of old corks, tangled string, crumbly loose tobacco, half a pipe, and, underneath all of it, a wad of papers with names, rents, and a haphazard pattern of check marks and crosses. It told Tina nothing she hadn’t already known. She thanked the man, patted the dog, and returned to Woolworth.

She spent a good hour filling in the forms for requesting no-maj official documents next, so she could ask O’Brien to sign off on them first thing in the morning. And then, because by that time she was antsy and amped up, she swung by the _Ghost_ offices and asked for thirty years’ worth of back issues, which she received charmed into one compact parcel that she had to levitate along because it weighed about the same, she hazarded, as a cruise ship. Back at her desk, she scribbled a row of words onto a scrap of paper, placed a locator spell woven through with a Lumos Duo on them, and settled down to leafing her way through the concrete block of _Ghost_ issues: banking on the admittedly slim chance that whatever made Modesty officially into a no-maj child, might have left some kind of trace of her mother in the papers.

And it did: in the early hours of the morning, Tina found the story of one Christabel Woodruff, only daughter of a San Francisco robemaker, who in 1908 eloped with a no-maj, making her guilty of violating Rappaport’s Law, and thus a fugitive.

Tina imagined her, young and pale and hair the same colour as Modesty’s, taking it on the lam with all her trust wrapped up warm and snug and placed in some no-maj boy, and her wand the only thing of her old life that she was taking with her as she made a run for it across the whole country, towards a dingy house and twelve children she’d end up unable to care for.

Then Tina rolled her eyes at herself. When they were kids, curled up together in the same bed, Queenie never once asked her for a story. She just listened to the things unravelling in her sister’s mind, sparked by an image or a word or a line of song from the wireless. The stories always spun themselves, but Tina’s glad that, back then, they were very different from Christabel’s.

As far as Tina can tell, the robemaker’s daughter never turned up again in San Francsico, or anywhere else. Tina is convinced this is Modesty’s mother; but she has to admit there’s a chance her conviction is up to three quarters desperation made acute by the long night and her fondness for Modesty; and at any rate her conviction alone won’t stand up in court. And so there’s nothing for it now but wait until the no-maj records arrive.

And freshen up.

On her way up to her apartment, Tina stops at the little mahogany table in the hallway, where Mrs. Esposito keeps a miniature post office for her tenants’ mail. Tina’s heart does a tiny leap against her ribcage as she opens her drawer. But there’s no letter. This is the longest Newt has ever taken to reply.

She stands and feels the sleepless night like sand on her face; and reasons that any number of things may have kept him from writing just yet. She tries to imagine what northern Scotland is like, and then reminds herself that he was fine in Alaska, and God knows where else, and _quit fretting, Tina, you’re being a hen._

She supposes she just would have liked to hear Newt’s voice, even if it was only in her imagination as she read his words. But for lack of those, she takes a fortifying breath, and hurries up the stairs.

She makes it back to work, considerably more put together than at sunrise, by the time the others on her shift clock in.

With the mystery of Modesty’s mother just beginning to unravel in an inconspicuous folder on her desk, and thoughts of Newt fluttering at the edges of her mind, it’s hard to focus on the task at hand. Especially because that task is following up on the tips about Grindelwald’s whereabouts and/or activities that come to MACUSA from the general magical populace across America. The department has begun taking turns working through reports of impersonations, disappearances, threats issued or suspicious conversations overheard, because it’s become such frustrating work to every auror in the building. The latent panic that has people imagining things and ascribing everything not immediately explicable to a powerful dark wizard, is understandable; but it also makes for an immense waste of time. They can count the leads that really take them somewhere on the fingers of one hand, and anyway it seems like they flushed out the bulk of Grindelwald’s followers during the first few weeks after his discovery, while they were still looking for Graves.

And because they’re well past fed up with unwitting red herrings and dead ends, Fenwick and Richter recently installed a filing box on an unoccupied desk in the middle of the bullpen, with labels stuck on the compartments reading ‘Outlandish,’ ‘V. Imaginative (Suggest That Informant Write Novel),’ ‘Refer to Marriage Counselling,’ and ‘?’. Deciding on the most accurate category for each unhelpful note is the most satisfaction they can get out of the entire process.

Five minutes before noon, Tina sticks the last message in ‘Conspiracy Theory’ and just catches O’Brien’s comment that “if it was Grindelwald, we’d know by now.”

O’Brien, Fenwick and Costanza are clustered around the corner of Costanza’s desk, coffee mugs in their hands, their lines of vision converging on the closed door just visible across the atrium, behind which is the anteroom to the President’s office.

Tina squints along with them for a moment, and then asks, “What’s going on?”

“That’s what we’d like to know,” Fenwick says. She’s a captivatingly attractive woman with a disconcerting talent for interrogation, a sense of humour darker than her pitch black hair, and a heart of gold. “The President’s been holed up in her office all morning with the Director and half the executive staff. By _all morning_ , I mean since yesterday. At least that’s the word on the street.”

By _street_ , she means the hallways. But Tina has to admit that that sounds intriguing.

“I don’t think it’s Grindelwald,” Costanza says. “What would they need Merle for?”

Tina frowns. As head of Magical Forensics, Merle indeed isn’t usually required to participate in emergency meetings. Although sometimes, of course, she is. For a brief, uncomfortably sharp moment, Tina sees the floating projection of Henry Shaw’s body before her mind’s eye again. The memory prickles on her scalp like hot water.

Before she can think too clearly of Credence, she asks, “How do you know Merle’s with them?”

“We don’t,” O’Brien says pointedly, into his coffee. It sounds like they’ve been over this a time or two and he’s trying, as usual, to hold everybody’s horses.

“She’s not downstairs, she doesn’t have the day off, and she hasn’t called in sick.” Fenwick shrugs casually. “Chances are.”

O’Brien blinks at her over the rim of his glasses. “You went and checked?”

“Sure. What else was I going to do? I’m an investigator.”

That, of course, is nothing any of those present can justifiably argue with. O’Brien sighs. “Well, we’ll find out when we find out, or we won’t. I know for a fact that Pechey’s potions business won’t bust itself, though, so let’s get lunch over with.” Tina smirks. _Get lunch over with_ is such an O’Brien thing to say.

“Sarge?” she calls before he can disappear to the break room. “Can I take a bit of a longer lunch break today? I’ve something important to do.”

O’Brien turns back to her. He has a way of looking at people that has thrown many a newbie auror into a chilly sweat; Tina included, back in the day. It takes some getting to know him to realise that his blankness of expression is habitual more than anything else, and that it’s usually a good idea to focus on his eyes to gauge his mood. His eyes are almost always kind.

“You were here all night, weren’t you? You can take a longer break if you promise the important thing isn’t for work.”

Tina smiles, probably more bashfully that she’d like. “It’s not,” she promises, and wonders why she ever bothers trying to hide anything from this man.

After a hasty glance at her pocket mirror and a few drops of Essence of Euphrasia, she slips out to meet Queenie in the lobby. They walk down the stairs together, Queenie with her arm through Tina’s and a spring in her step. Jacob is waiting for them outside the building.

He’s brought them a lunch assembled from his bakery and the deli across the street from Kowalski’s, and they set off together.

Tina’s fingertips are riddled with paper cuts from the flock of birds she’s made over the past days. They sting when she writes and every time she washes her hands, but that’s well worth it: when Modesty spots her across the street, she comes without hesitation now, and without trepidation on her young face.

Tina crouches and greets the girl with a smile. “I brought my sister,” she says, “like I promised.”

Queenie has something summarily winning about her. It’s in part her Legilimency, of course, her ability to tune into someone’s wavelength immediately and effortlessly. It makes people feel like they’ve been friends with her forever. But it isn’t just that, not by a long shot. Queenie’s just a gentle soul.

Modesty is diffident, but hardly more so than she has been with Tina. She lets Queenie tug the peach scarf more snugly around her shoulders, and answers her questions, sometimes even with words.

But with Jacob, she thaws almost immediately. Jacob, who just trudges along, taking this in stride like he’s done everything else, with all his big heart; from falling head over heels for a mind-reader, to his new very own occamy that Newt has named after him, to an entire world he never even imagined before he was plunged right into it and its troubles. Today, it’s just a little orphan witch whom he’s packed extra lunch for.

Modesty accepts a sandwich, shyly but eagerly, and they all eat in silence for some minutes, sitting on a park bench like windswept beads on a string. Jacob and Queenie start feeding pigeons with bits of crumb, and quickly end up embroiled in a contest of who can win the favour of the most birds. Queenie giggles delightedly when Jacob accuses her of pigeon legilimency.

Modesty watches them with fascination. When Jacob has conceded victory to Queenie, and there are no breadcrumbs or bites of sandwich left, she gathers up her courage and asks, “Are you a witch, too?”

Jacob, rummaging in an almost dauntingly large paper bag that’s begun to bleed butter in some spots, raises his eyebrows at her. “Me, darlin’? No, I’m not a witch. I’m not even a wizard. Though don’t I wish I was?”

“Jacob grew up without any magic,” Tina explains. “Just like you, Modesty.”

“But you’re a wizard with flour and sugar, honey,” Queenie says to Jacob, who chuckles and sticks his whole face in the paper bag, conceivably to hide a blush. “Speaking of which,” he says when he remerges, to offer Modesty a paczki.

“You like those, darlin’?” he asks when she has her lips encrusted in sugar.

Modesty nods. “I like orange.”

Jacob beams triumphantly. Modesty has probably just won his heart, Tina thinks, by noticing the orange zest. Much to her shame, she didn’t, and she’s fairly certain Queenie only did because Jacob unwittingly tipped her off about it. Although Queenie will vehemently deny that whenever questioned.

“Maybe you could add a little more cinnamon?” Modesty mumbles.

For just a moment, Jacob looks nonplussed. Then he seems to put serious thought into the matter. “More cinnamon? In those?”

“In everything.”

“Everything? Oh, okay.” Jacob laughs. “I can do that. Even the ‘rumpents, though?”

Modesty looks up at Tina questioningly. She has sugar on the tip of her nose.

“I don’t think I’ve brought her one of those yet. They look a lot like a rhinoceros?”

Modesty shakes her head.

“No?” Jacob asks. “Well, you gotta come by the bakery, then, and try one. Queenie’ll make you cocoa. She makes the best cocoa in the world.”

“Why do you bake things that look like animals?”

“Oh, well, you see, they aren’t normal animals. They’re magical ones. And my friend, Newt—he’s a wizard, like these guys here—and he has all these magical creatures that he cares for. I got to see them, and it was pretty amazing, you know? For a _no-maj_ like me. So I make pastries that look like them, so I don’t forget.”

Not that there’s any danger of that anymore. If Jacob ever felt like he was forgetting what Jacob the occamy looks like, he could ask Newt for a visit, and sooner or later, he’d be playing with his namesake, and his pal Dougal, and the mooncalves. Tina still can’t really believe it. Then she quickly makes her smile brighter, because she realises that her sister is looking at her and, bless her and damn her, Queenie probably caught her thoughts getting all snagged on Newt; tumbling back to the morning and the letters in the hallway that weren’t from Newt.

Tina looks away and puts her train of thought forcefully back on track; to hear Modesty ask, “Are you scared?”

“Scared, darlin’?” Jacob repeats, sounding honestly surprised. “Of what?”

Modesty hesitates. Her eyes dart to Tina, then Queenie. She’s such a clever girl, Tina thinks. Clever enough not to be lured immediately by pastries and gentle faces and voices, not even Queenie’s and Jacob’s. But also clever enough to recognise them for the good people they are. And so, risking it, she answers: “Magic.”

“Oh! Oh, no. Not at all. And I’ll be honest with you: I’m scared of plenty of things. Banks, for example. My aunt Dita’s golabki. Big waves. You know, on the beach, the kind that knock you over and then you don’t know which way’s up anymore?” He thinks. “Spiders!”

Modesty giggles. And Tina feels like her face might split in two from how the sound makes her really smile; alternatively, she feels like she might start crying.

“But not magic, no,” Jacob continues. “I love magic. It’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He smiles at Modesty, and then he looks at Queenie.

 _No matter what_ , Tina thinks, as she watches her sister smile back, _one day everything will be perfect_.

*

When Tina returns from lunch, a sand-coloured envelope is waiting on her desk, with a stamp in the corner and all the signs of having travelled here the non-magical postal way.

Hastily, she drops her hat on a paper mouse that she notices too late, but ignores the indignant, muffled squeaking in favour of tearing open the envelope to reveal a thin folder that contains the files from the no-maj Records Office she requested yesterday.

She forgets about her coat and sits down in her desk chair as she is, trailing the tip of her finger down a long list of names.

She gets through two pages. Then Laurence appears at her desk; he says nothing, but smiles at her in the polite, articulate way he has cultivated. There’s a glossary of Laurence’s facial expressions somewhere in the bullpen, too. Wide eyes, open mouth, barely detectable crease between eyebrows: Picquery has confused him because, unbeknownst to him, she enjoys doing that occasionally. Somewhat thin-lipped but ostensibly calm smile, one too many blinks a minute: _President requests your presence. Please follow, urgently_.

All the while (which really is only a handful of minutes, but feels like a particularly glacial half-hour) that she’s hurrying to keep up with the President’s secretary, Tina feverishly tries to figure out what she’s done.

She hurtles back in her mind over her steps since she spoke to Picquery, and can’t find anything out of order. She observed all the rules of interactions with no-maj authorities to the letter. She hasn’t overstepped any lines (none that she hadn’t already overstepped yesterday, at any rate). She hasn’t even told anyone in the department of her side-project, yet.

She must have missed something. Can it be that it’s nothing to do with Modesty? She can’t shake the nauseating feeling that it’s something fundamental, something terrible, because even polished, unflappable Laurence seems a little flustered. One of this auburn locks is bobbing loosely atop his head, and that never, ever happens. He’s always every bit as put together as Picquery, which is a feat, and also clearly a question of honour for him.

Tina swallows what must be her heart when he stops by the door to the President’s office, and gestures for her to go through. Because she has no choice, and feeling much like the proverbial deer caught in a Lumos charm, she obeys.

The first person Tina sees, is Newt. The second is Percival Graves.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all - a huge huge thank you to everyone who's commented and left kudos! You guys are the best!
> 
> Second, apologies for the somewhat abrupt ending to this one. It was meant to have a second, shorter part, but best laid plans and all that. The second part will be in the next chapter, or maybe it'll be its own chapter.
> 
> I hope you'll still enjoy this one, and I do appreciate comments and kudos endlessly, so, if you like it, and even if you dislike it - tell me :)

It takes Graves a few moments to notice that their last auror has arrived. He’s seemed like a puff of wind might knock him over since they came back to her office from the Council Chamber, and after the morning they’ve had, it doesn’t surprise Seraphina.

And, well, perhaps they should have, back in Savannah, slept a little more, and talked a little less, too. But when they’d gone over the past three months, the truth against the backdrop of Grindelwald’s version of events, she kept talking, because who else could she have told how _things are off in a way I’m finding difficult to fix?_ And Graves didn’t want her to stop talking, anyway.

But she supposes she could have slipped him some Dreamless Sleep. Not that he would have taken that kindly.

She had woken Merle at an ungodly hour for the second night in a row, and, when they’d assembled at Woolworth, left her and Graves to themselves for a while; pacing her office as she waited, composing her address to Congress in her mind. Until she realised that Congress would probably not give her the chance to get a coherent paragraph in edgewise (she was right), so she scrapped the drafts, drank coffee, and tried not to think about anything for a while.

The first question, once Congress remembered its customary gravitas and voices were distinguishable enough so that Laurence could start keeping the minutes, came from Congressman Wimple (Texas). He’s a quarrelsome man with an overbearing personality, but for once his question was to the forefront of everybody else’s minds, too.

Though others might have less overtly relished being the one to pose it.

“ _How_ could this happen?”

Merle answered: about the spells and curses and obfuscations that made their unknown no-maj seem to be Graves, and everyone believe it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

There was some muttering. Everyone’s inclined kindly towards Merle, even Congressman Wimple. Seraphina could see in her set face that she was ready for any questions as to her own failings; but outrageous as were the lengths to which Grindelwald went in his hunt for the obscurus, the facts add up.

“What’s been compromised?”

“Nothing we haven’t already secured again. You can view the records if you wish,” Seraphina said. This was three hours later. She was slowly growing impatient, and masking it behind a measured voice.

“Of course I couldn’t keep everything from him,” Graves said. “Not all the time.”

“What do you mean, _of course_?” asked someone.

Graves gave whoever it was a long, steady look. “I mean Grindelwald is very good at it, and he was draining my magic, so I only had so much to fight him with.”

Merle said she could pinpoint the places where Grindelwald pushed though; skilful, like a viper, she said. The traces were like cauterised incisions, precise, barely visible; but not deep. The bruises did go deep, though, she said: where Grindelwald didn’t get what he wanted, but tried and tried and tried. With force when finesse didn’t work, just as Graves had said, in Savannah.

“What was he looking for?” _Emergency plans, security protocols? Weaknesses, Achilles’ heels?_ _Names?_

It was a fair question. Graves said he didn’t think Grindelwald meant to dismantle MACUSA more than once in the course of the morning; that Grindelwald was playing a different game, single-mindedly. And they’d agreed, more than once, that if it were different, they’d know by now. _But then,_ _what?_

“He wanted to tap into my visions,” Graves said. He seemed fairly beat by then, but Seraphina suspected that the drop in his voice was owed more to the reflexive hope that _visions_ would go unnoticed, than to exhaustion.

“ _Visions?_ You’re a seer?”

“No,” Graves said, much more emphatically.

“You see things but you’re not a seer? Which one is it, Mr. Graves?” Celestia Drambuie, Kentucky. Graves smiled at her despite the brusqueness of her question. She’s a kind woman and they always talk about the Derby over coffee or something stronger, every May. She just has a fairly militant way with words.

“I’m not a seer,” Graves repeated. “I get visions sometimes. They’re rare and never very clear.” He paused. “It runs in the family.”

“It runs—”

“But that hardly explains why you told no one that you saw something you thought might be an obscurus, in New York City. If I may say so.” Basil Fontaine, California. Family friend. Seraphina relaxed a little, realising only as she did that she’d grown tense. 

Graves gave the same answer he’d given her when she’d asked two nights ago, just in many more words. It had been an easy thing for her to understand, but it was also an easy one for Congress to question. ~~~~

“I’ll play devil’s advocate, then,” said someone. _Please do, then_ , Seraphina thought. _Because you’ve been beating around the bush all morning_.

She supposed it said something good that no one had asked outright yet; about Graves’s loyalties.

But there wasn’t really any way around it, either.

None of which made it easier for Graves to hear those particular questions: she could tell from the way his posture froze, and in the careful, studied composedness of his face.

Several hours earlier, Merle had said there were things that didn’t belong; false memories and wisps of thoughts smuggled in, sharp-edged too, and coloured violent and loud to make them acute and urgent.

“What kind of false memories?”

 _Use your imagination_ , Seraphina thought.

“How can you tell them apart from the genuine ones?”

“Because it’s my job,” Merle replied. She’s more patient than Seraphina by nature, but less skilled in hiding it when her patience runs out.

“I’d like to see it,” said Wimple.

“See what?”

“The difference between those foreign memories and the … native ones, shall we say? You’re a forensic legilimens, Miss Eldjárn. The trouble with experts is that no one else understands their craft. Isn’t it? I’d like to see for myself what you’re talking about.”

“You have us experts so that _that_ kind of thing isn’t necessary,” Merle muttered, quietly enough for but few people to hear, none of them being Congressman Wimple.

Seraphina couldn’t guess what went through Graves’s head at that point. He seemed to mostly forget where he was for a few moments, studying the inlaid marble and brass of the floor. Then he pulled himself together and said, “All right, Mr. Wimple. Go on.”

Seraphina also didn’t know if he agreed because he anticipated the outcome. At any rate, the topic was closed after that particular show, stretches of Graves’s memories playing out on the Congress floor.

Graves looked at her, briefly, when it was over, and she wished she could have willed away the sixty other people in the room.

But at least it wasn’t much longer before, instead of another endless variation on _What happened?_ , someone asked, “What happens next?”

Like an answer, Theseus Scamander arrived not a quarter-hour later with his younger brother and a handful of news in tow; and gave Seraphina good reason to send Congress on its way.

Coming back to her office was like stepping into the eye of a storm. Of the five-dozen-and-change people attached to a full Congress meeting, only Belinda Periwinkle and MACUSA’s Head of International Magical Co-operation Cyprian Maddox remained. The comparative quiet was much like a soothing breeze.

The column of hazy sunlight drifting straight as a die from the enchanted skylight, fizzling out in a circle precisely above her conference table, told Seraphina that it was noon, though she sure felt like it was early evening at least. She watched Graves for a few moments, trying to gauge if he was mostly fine, or mostly not; it was difficult to say, which, she eventually decided, was a good thing, because at least a stable façade counts for business as usual around here.

On a rare whim, Seraphina sent Laurence to Jacob Kowalski’s bakery for some of those pastries she’d been hearing so much about recently: because she realised she was hungry, and thought that everyone in the room might benefit from a generous dose of sugar, all considered. Periwinkle gave her a bewildered look, but didn’t complain, which turned out to be mostly owed to a hitherto unknown, but pronounced weakness for crème pâtissière.

Then Seraphina sent Laurence to collect aurors.

Four out of five, he found right away: Fenwick and Ventresca just as they were heading out, and O’Brien and Ludlow poring over paperwork. Only Goldstein wasn’t at her desk.

That was about an hour ago, but not much has happened since then, except for pastry-eating, a lot of gaping and explaining, and, most recently, some exchanging of information and ideas. Tina Goldstein’s arrival pauses that again.

She comes in a little pale about the nose, with her coat still on and her heart, as ever, on her sleeve. Three paces into the room, she stops dead in her tracks and gains some perfectly eloquent colour as she spots Newt Scamander; then she sees Graves, and goes white as a ghost.

“Goldstein,” Seraphina says after a moment. “Join us, will you?”

The young woman’s gaze flies to her like a snap. “… Ma’am?”

“We’ve a concrete lead on Grindelwald. Come, time’s a-wastin’.”

Seraphina doesn’t mean to tease her. But after the very long morning, too little sleep, and possibly a bit too much coffee, it just happens. She’ll admit, though, that Goldstein can hardly be expected to take the quite unexpected presence of her dead mentor in stride without a hitch. So she sits back while Graves explains, again. He’s thoroughly tired of it by now, but at least it’s much easier with the aurors than it was with Congress, or anybody else. They’re very clearly still his people.

Next to Seraphina, Periwinkle fidgets for a brief moment.

The woman is known for an aloofness of professionalism that at times makes Seraphina look like one of her own kid-gloved Public Inquiries officers, but today has her flustered. She’s evidently entirely uncertain what it means that Graves is alive, and here. The way her best aurors have been reacting, like the streak of bad luck that were the months since last December was, just like that, broken, can’t be helping.

Seraphina calls for more coffee, and offers her DMLE a cup, but says nothing. Not so much because she couldn’t. It gives her a pang, as she watches Graves with the aurors, to know that it won’t be like this again; that she can’t turn back the clock and have him by her side again like she used to for nearly six years.

She does know that. She’s just a little too tired to actually say it just yet, and worried it’ll come out sentimental if she does. Which also wouldn’t be too helpful for Periwinkle, she suspects.

So she just lets a few more minutes slip by in silence, and then asks: “You’re aware of your duties in my absence, Director?”

Periwinkle looks at her, with her unreadable face and cool grey eyes. “Yes, Ma’am.” Everything about her is cool. The undertone of her skin and the colours she chooses to wear, the ash-blonde shade of her hair. Her contained, elegant posture and her voice. Even her kindness, which Seraphina has seen, and knows for a fact to exist. “Am I to understand by your question that you intend to be part of this mission?”

“You are, yes,” Seraphina answers mildly, and before Periwinkle can cut in, continues: “Much as it pains me to admit it, this time around it was us who let Grindelwald slip away, and the least I can do, now that we can fairly assume he’s in the UK, is to see the Minister for Magic about it personally.”

“This will not end with a visit to the Minister.”

Seraphina inclines her head. “Perhaps not.”

“I have to decidedly object, Madam President. This is far too great a risk. There’s more unknown than known variables, and we’re talking about Grindelwald here.”

Seraphina gives her a non-committal smile. “I’m aware. Normally, I would agree with you.” She pauses to turn her coffee cup by one hundred and eighty degrees. Pointlessly, she finds herself imagining this same conversation with Graves. _You really think it’s a good idea for you to come along for this?—Good idea? Maybe not. Surely this isn’t the worst idea I’ve ever had, though.—Maybe not_.

Or perhaps she’s romanticising that. If they’ve done one thing well over the years, it’s to not let their personal relationship cancel out the requirements of their positions. That was the promise, after all. Or a version of it. Then her thoughts take her back to inauguration day, and she quickly reels them back in from there.

“You’ll understand that I feel responsible for what happens to Credence Barebone,” she says.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Periwinkle square her shoulders; choosing her words.

“You made the only possible call when you ordered the obscurus to be taken out,” she says; with distinct emphasis on _obscurus_.

It’s odd, Seraphina thinks, that she’s never managed to warm up to this woman. If this were any other situation: if it was last week, and she was talking to Goldstein, or Congress, Seraphina might have said the precise same thing, with precisely the same intonation.

As it is, she replies: “I know. But that doesn’t change the fact that the _obscurial_ survived, and is in danger as a direct consequence of my decision. Nor the fact that, if Grindelwald catches him, we’ll have a much bigger problem on our hands than we already do.”

“A problem that it’s _our_ duty to prevent or confront, Ma’am, not yours personally.”

“Well. Which is why I’m not going all by my lonesome, isn’t it?” The easiest thing would be to tell Periwinkle that she has no intention of having anything but a diplomatic function; that she’ll stay at the Ministry, supervise, assist; which would also be a lie, and not fair to the person who will be left in charge, should something go wrong.

Seraphina smiles again, and tries to make it just a little warmer. “So reassure me again that you know your vice-presidential duties, Director.”

Periwinkle, for her part, recognises a lost cause when she’s facing one; although Seraphina supposes there’s a chance she’s just retreating for the time being, to strategise. At any rate, she says, “I am, Ma’am,” and leaves it at that.

Across the table, Theseus is telling Goldstein what he told everyone else before she joined them: that he’d gone to meet Newt in Edinburgh again after Graves had already returned to America, and a conference with the Minister. Newt had spent his time wandering the city, intermittently picking secluded spots and waiting there for a while, in hopes of catching sight of Credence again. But he didn’t.

Nor did they encounter any sign of Grindelwald. So, eventually, they returned to London together, to meet with Fawley again.

“I’ve sent a team up North,” Theseus says now, and gives Graves a nod. “To where you and Newt last saw the obscurus. They’ve been searching the area. We’ve drawn a wide radius, since you said you weren’t sure how far from Grindelwald’s last hideout you met Newt. But they haven’t turned up anything so far, either.”

There’s a map spread across Seraphina’s table, that Theseus brought: of the British Isles, dotted with bright pinpricks representing his aurors; moving incrementally sometimes, when someone Apparates some longer way. Theseus watches them thoughtfully for a moment, then gestures generally at the map.

“Everyone else I have available is stationed across the country to guard the civilian population and report anything and everything,” he goes on. “But the Ministry hasn’t issued any official statement yet. Like you, we think that if we still have an element of surprise, we’d better use it. That said,” he pauses, looking at Graves again. “We’re finding it difficult to agree on how to use it, exactly. I’ve communicated what you told me, but the Minister hopes to speak to you himself.”

 _Hopes_ , Seraphina hazards, being a euphemism for _demands_. Graves only nods. ~~~~

“Well,” Seraphina says. “I’m glad to hear he’s beginning to recognise the severity of the threat that Grindelwald poses.”

Theseus smiles thinly. It’s an ill-kept secret that Hector Fawley and his DMLE don’t see eye to eye on a number of issues: Grindelwald being one of them. Theseus shifts in his chair and seems to be contemplating a reply; weighing, Seraphina assumes, diplomacy and duty against who he’s talking to, and his own frustration. “He’s recognising the threat that the obscurus poses.”

Seraphina purses her lips to keep herself from sighing. Probably she should have guessed. But she does wonder what it’ll take to make Fawley realise that Grindelwald isn’t some conman without resources or resonance.

Next to Theseus, his brother and Goldstein are whispering, gradually drawing in O’Brien and Ventresca. Seraphina can’t make out their words, but she can read Goldstein’s agitation.

Not for the first time, she wonders what induced this girl to become an auror. Not because she doesn’t have the skill or the guts; but because whatever she _has_ , she _is_ all heart. Then again, it’s true of course that it’s always the ones who feel too much, who make the most important kind of difference. Graves, Seraphina supposes, is right when he thinks that Goldstein has a remarkable career in her.

She asks Theseus about Credence Barebone now, her fingers woven together tightly as if she has to physically keep herself from Disapparating right this moment, to try to find him. There’s a pregnant pause after her question. The Minister for Magic, it transpires, is not inclined to cut Credence Barebone any slack; naturally, the younger Scamander tried persuading him that the boy could, had to be saved; but Fawley was unwilling to listen for the same reasons that Seraphina decided as she did in City Hall station.

“Credence Barebone is undeniably our responsibility,” Maddox offers at length, in his calm, sonorous voice. He’s one of the oldest members of Seraphina’s staff, an imposing man with a Victorian moustache, a pocket watch that tells the time in the chirps of birds instead of hands and numerals, and a character to go with all that perfectly. He’s both good-natured and no-nonsense, likeable and tough; an unbeatable combination, arguably, for someone who navigates the turbulent waters of international relations, jurisdictions, sensibilities, and legal claims for a living.

“As an American citizen,” he reassures Goldstein, “he certainly is. And our, shall we say, prerogative?” He pauses. “Still, if this develops into anything remotely like we’ve had here in December—”

“I can’t interfere with whatever orders the Minister may see fit to issue to his own aurors to ensure the safety of his people,” Seraphina finishes for him. “Let’s hope this _won’t_ turn into another December 7 th.”

“Assuming we manage to … apprehend Mr. Barebone,” Periwinkle speaks up. “What do you propose we do with him?”

“We help him,” Newt Scamander says, in the way he says all things that are so crystal clear, so indisputable, to his generous, gentle nature. It’s clear to him, and clear to Goldstein, and Seraphina realises with the strange sensation of something tightening around her chest, that she wishes she could step over to their side, and see it all through their eyes. But it’s all not so clear when it comes to facts and the law, and so she can’t.

“Assuming he’s apprehended, his case will have to go through Congress, first,” she says, and raises a hand before Goldstein or Scamander can protest. “I promise that I’ll argue his case myself this time around. But it’ll have to be argued.” ~~~~

“What’s his case to be, exactly?” Maddox asks.

“That he be a given the chance to learn to control his magic,” Scamander says; half to answer Maddox’s question and half, Seraphina suspects, to confirm that this is what she meant by her words, too.

Periwinkle looks around the table, evidently in search of something. When she doesn’t find it, she says: “With the obscurus in him? You want to teach him to control _that_ kind of power?”

“What else would you do with it?” asks Graves.

“Mr. Scamander has found a way to extract an obscurus once before.”

“She died,” Scamander says, quick as a shot. “ _Because_ I extracted it. Because taking away the obscurus means taking _all_ the magic. They’re inextricable.”

Maddox clears his throat, and Fenwick crosses her arms like the air has suddenly turned chilly. The thought of losing magic is nauseating. It’s a death sentence, and the worst imaginable.

“There’s no precedent for a person learning to use magic after it has been warped into an obscurus. We don’t even know if it’s possible at all,” Periwinkle argues. She’s right, of course. Knowledge on anything related to obscurials and their magic is sketchy at best, and after centuries without known cases, it’s also dated.

“Credence is more than twice the age obscurials usually live to,” Graves says. “He must have some kind of connection to magic that has allowed him to survive.”

Maddox frowns. “Like some kind of antibody, you mean?”

Graves wordlessly passes the question on to Scamander, who begins, “No, not quite,” but then seems to decide that, between the research gap, his non-specialist audience, and his own uncertainty, it’s just as well to say, “Or, yes. Something of the sort, if you will.”

“That is an awful lot of guesswork,” Periwinkle remarks, pointedly.

And, well. Seraphina can only agree. _We’ll just have to figure this one out as we go_ , she hears herself say, but if the situation were any different—if it wasn’t for Graves, and his investedness in this boy’s fate; if it wasn’t her own mistakes that lead to this—she wouldn’t consider that a good enough strategy by a long shot, either.

Many years ago, Graves asked her if she never missed it: being in the field. Sitting still, making decisions but not carrying any of them out is as little in her blood as it is in his. Back then, she teased him about how he was the only one at MACUSA who’d managed, by doing his job fairly unorthodoxly, to combine the best of both worlds. _Most of us_ , she said _, have to choose. Can’t have everything_. Even now she remembers his pause before he said, _True_.

She misses it. She spent less than a year on active duty before changing tack by accepting a position with the diplomatic corps. When the war came, she scowled at the naiveté of all the young people, no-maj and magical alike, who were so eager to enlist, like a war was some kind of dance; and deep down beneath that, she felt relief. At being able to use her voice for spells and curses, magical and plain old profanities, instead of just things that wouldn’t so much as a crack an eggshell.

Like everybody else who fought, she came out on the other side a different person in many ways, and she’d come to think of the presidency as the place that would let her achieve the most, affect the most. It was the place for her, even if she couldn’t have everything. ~~~~

 _So what’s going on now, Seraphina?_ She sips on her cooled coffee and puts her money on nostalgia. Just because she knows she can’t go back, doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to; or won’t let herself, some way.  

She catches Graves’s gaze, and that’s not a good idea with this particular bundle of memories so alive to her just now. _Goddammit_ , she thinks, and wonders where they’ll be when this is over.

Then O’Brien’s voice pulls her out of her thoughts again, and she realises she’s become the subject of discussion.

As longest-serving senior auror and sergeant of the investigative team, O’Brien has a vote in executive decisions, and he’s clearly decided to make use of the fact now: to agree with Periwinkle that the President can’t head an international manhunt for Grindelwald. She’s the President. Does she want her personal guard to die of anxiety and stress?

“I’m not heading anything,” Seraphina says. That much is, after all, true. “I’m going to meet with the Minister for Magic. In his office.” That much is also true.

“Not to worry, Mr. Cadell,” Theseus tells Laurence a few lines of argumentation later. “I assure you we won’t let the President of Wizarding America come to any harm on our soil.”

Laurence blinks at him, and then, by way of displacement activity, turns back to Seraphina. “Ma’am—”

“Laurence, I’m going to see the Minister for Magic. Please don’t cause a diplomatic scandal by implying that that is a risk to my safety.”

 Shocked blinking. “No, Ma’am.”


	9. Chapter 9

They only have the afternoon, a few hours before they’re due back at MACUSA to take a portkey to London. Until then, everyone involved has been exempted from their regular duties, with only the strict order to not divulge a word about Graves, Grindelwald, Credence, or the mission.

Tina knows that O’Brien and Fenwick returned to their desks anyway because _the paperwork doesn’t care if we’re chasing Grindelwald or not_ , but Ventresca and Ludlow left Woolworth together with her and Newt.

They walked a few blocks together, chatting; or rather, it was mostly aurors asking one another, _Can you believe it? Cause I can’t.—Wait till the others find out!_ — _Hillard_ ’ _s_ definitely _gonna cry.—No he won’t, stop making fun of him. Ain’t nothing wrong with having a softer side, anyway.—Wanna bet, though?—Yup, round of giggle water.—You got it.;_ and Newt observing them like they were a flock of newly discovered and fairly charming, if a little nonsensical creatures.

At Canal Street, Ventresca and Ludlow left them, sauntering off in search of an early supper, and Newt and Tina cut across towards the Hudson, to follow the riverbank for a while. They stop to watch a steamer make its leisurely way downstream, the people on deck vague, windswept figures, waving at smaller vessels passing them.

It reminds Tina of saying goodbye to Newt the first time, and she tells him she’s happy that he’s here. “Even though you probably didn’t mean to come, really,” she adds.

Newt shrugs, a shy quirk to the corner of his mouth. He studies the river intently. “Oh, Theseus would’ve been fine explaining everything without my help, I expect.”

Tina hooks her fingers around the promenade railing. “Hm,” she says, and turns away to hide her smile.

They both go back to looking out across the water for a while in easy silence. The sky is overcast and colourless, giving the afternoon a muted quality, as if someone forgot to turn on the light somewhere. Seagulls wheel through the crisp air, complaining pitifully, as they always do.

“Sorry I didn’t write,” Newt says eventually. “I didn’t want to have to lie to you—I really wanted to tell you everything that had happened, but at first I thought perhaps I shouldn’t tell anyone at all: not in a letter. And then Theseus was very adamant that I mustn’t, until the thing with Mr. Graves was official. Or, well. Until you knew, at least.”

Tina traces his words with a smile. He’s talking quickly—he often does: when he’s excited, or angry, or being sarcastic; now it spells sincerity. “That’s all right,” she tells him. “I would have acted the same way.”

Then she can’t help laughing. “Though I won’t say I’d have minded a little warning. Mercy Lewis.” She still finds it all hard to believe. It’s like the world did a pirouette in the space of a heartbeat, and some things ended up turned on their heads in the process. The right way up again, sure, but it’s still dizzying.

Absently, Tina brushes stray hair out of her eyes, and winces at the coldness in her fingertips: realising that she forgot to put on her gloves, and didn’t even notice until now. The bustle and rollercoaster emotions of the past hours, and the worked-through night, are banding together to sneak up on her, evidently. With a shiver, she shoves her hands in her coat pockets.

“Did Graves tell you anything about it?” she asks after a moment. “What it was like, with Grindelwald?”

Newt shakes his head. “Not really, no. I didn’t ask either, though. It seemed best to leave him alone, mostly, you know?”

Tina chews on her bottom lip. “Yeah,” she says quietly. She isn’t sure what she would have hoped to hear, anyway. That three months’ captivity were nothing, that Grindelwald didn’t do anything to Graves at all, and that, therefore, all of her and everyone else’s mistakes really didn’t weigh that much, on balance?

 _What nonsense_ , she thinks, with a flare of frustration.

Which seems to show, somehow, because Newt looks over at her. “What is it?”

Tina keeps worrying her lip for a moment, then she shakes her head. “Nothing. Just a lot to take in.” She returns Newt’s gaze and smiles. “Walk on?”

Newt nods, picking up his case, and they turn their backs on the outbound steamer and continue upriver for a while, before eventually deciding to Apparate the rest of the way, as far as possible.

On the corner of 24th and 11th, Newt climbs into his case, and Tina stops to chat with Mrs. Esposito before she carries it up the stairs to her apartment.

She spends an hour with Newt in the case, saying hello to the creatures, some of whom, to her delight, haven’t forgotten her. The niffler manages to steal her locket twice, but then she has his MO down (she’s an auror after all). The third time, she still lets him snatch it, and then makes a show of choosing new jewellery from his hoard with much deliberation, to compensate. It ends, as she suspected, in a trade: her locket for a diamond necklace and matching bracelet and earrings. Tina wrinkles her nose at the niffler. “Gotcha,” she says, though the creature is evidently of the decided opinion that she’s the one who made the bad bargain here.

Newt watches with a blush on his cheeks; his sleeves rolled up and the golden light of an enchanted sun playing with his freckles. “Sometimes I don’t notice he’s nicked something until we’re three countries away,” he explains, unprompted, and clearly a little embarrassed. “I usually try to figure out where he might have got the things, and to return them, but, well.”

Tina looks up at him, marvelling all over again at this life he’s chosen and made for himself, and, well. Him. “Yeah.”

Back upstairs, Tina makes them cocoa: in remembrance of the last time, when Newt quite spurned it. They laugh about it now, and Tina thinks how happy it makes her that this time around, he doesn’t seem in any hurry at all to be leaving.

He studies the photographs on the mantelpiece: of Queenie and her when they were children, giggly and happy, taken the summer before their parents died; of all four of them, still longer ago, Queenie just barely not a toddler anymore, and Tina with her hair past her waist. Next to the photos, there’s a pearl cotton butterfly that Queenie once embroidered, in a small frame it’s been trying to bat past ever since there were enough stitches in each wing. Queenie nearly didn’t finish it for frustration over having to case it all across the embroidery hoop with her needle: which is why the bottom half of its right wing is missing the otherwise delicately done coral-coloured markings.

Newt watches it for a minute or so, and Tina wonders if he’s contemplating coaxing it into a real butterfly and adopting it. Embroidered creature brought to life. Would the stitches come loose with time anyway? An interesting study, surely.

She sips on her cocoa, and then asks: “Did you grow up in London?”

“Theseus and I? Yes, we did. But I often spent time with my grandparents. They retired to Windermere.” He looks at her “In the Lake District?” It’s evidently clear from her expression that she can’t place either of the designations, so Newt adds: “Just south of Scotland, in the countryside. Hills and lakes and forest. Always lots to discover for me.” He pauses. “It’s really quite beautiful. You should come see it sometime.”

Tina smiles, with warm cheeks. “I’d like that,” she says, and tries to imagine it: how, and when, she could make that trip.

Before it occurs to her that she and Newt are, in fact, very much headed to England together in the immediate future. “Maybe I can have some days off when this is over,” she jokes, being half-serious. And half-startled.

Spending time with Newt, the mission ahead must have slipped her mind somewhere between giggling over the sounds the mooncalves make when happily chasing pellets, and figuring out the niffler.

Remembering it leaves her with mixed feelings.

It’s a diplomatic mission. _Of course_. But Tina can read between the lines.

And she’s relieved that there _was_ something between the lines of what was being said in the President’s office. Because she wants to go, almost desperately, to save Credence; to bring Grindelwald to justice for the things he’s done to all of them. To finally catch him.

But she’s also scared: that someone will get hurt, that she’ll get hurt herself. That she’ll lose Newt, or he’ll lose his brother, or Queenie will lose her. She’s been told this keeps her on her toes, and makes her a better auror, not weaker, even if it means the work is sometimes harder on her.

Right now, she’d still rather leave off fretting over what’s to come for a little while longer. _Only useful in small doses at the right time_. She breathes in the scent of warm milk and chocolate, trying to chase away apprehension; it won’t quite budge again, though, settling in instead like a low buzz with everything else swirling through her head, prickling like soda powder on her skin.

When the cocoa’s all gone, they both curl up on the sofa, Newt telling her about the Lake District, then the Keelut in Scotland. Tina listens, her body tingling, and thinks that if Newt gives any indication at all that he wants her, that perhaps that’s why he came with her instead of staying with his brother at MACUSA, she won’t hesitate for a moment.

But Newt only looks at her a little blushingly sometimes: clearly wanting to be close to her, she thinks she can be sure of that much. But he really seems to be in no hurry at all, about anything. And she has to admit that maybe that feels most right, despite the butterflies beneath her skin.

So she laces her fingers through his, and focuses to his voice.

They talk about Credence eventually, of course: rehashing things they discussed twice over already in writing, picking up others they’d discarded, as if just by that they might arrive at some epiphany. At long last, they have to admit that they’ll just have to wait and see; and Tina says: “I wish I could tell Modesty that he’s alive.” She’s inched a little closer, her head almost on Newt’s shoulder. She peers up at him. “We have to save him, this time.”

“We will,” Newt replies, easily, like it’s no question at all.

Tina feels herself begin to smile. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” _This is bad_ , she thinks. _I’d probably believe anything you told me like that._ “Okay.”

“How’s it going with Modesty?”

“Oh!” Tina exclaims, and sits up a little again: because of course Newt doesn’t know yet about Christabel, and her no-maj tragedy, or that Picquery seems willing to let Tina bring Modesty into the magical community, where she belongs.

“And when you find her mother?” Newt asks when Tina has told him about all that. “I mean, when you’ve proven she’s magical?”

“We’ll find her a family. Someone who’ll treat her well and teach her a little magic and love her. And in two years she can go to Ilvermorny. And we can see her in the summer. Imagine.”

Tina listens to her own voice die away, and blushes. She’s dreamed it all up, and she’s getting ahead of herself already again. _Silly_ , she chastises herself. But Newt, if his smile is anything to go by, doesn’t think so.

He asks her about adoption policies in Wizarding America, and their conversation gradually becomes a story about a litter of kneazles Newt once found somewhere in some rural stretch of England, and tiredness begins to buzz about Tina like a surprisingly gentle insect. She tries to bat it away, but it’s getting harder and harder.

She wakes up again to shifted shadows, with her forehead against Newt's neck and his arm around her shoulder, lightly, gently, his fingers on her sleeve like a butterfly. His breathing is quiet and even, and she can just make out his heartbeat beneath the scratchy tweed of his jacket. He smells of grass and sun and wood and she wishes she'd never have to be anywhere else in the world again.

But eventually, she gets up, to change into something more any-eventuality than her desk-day wardrobe, and hops downstairs to let Mrs. Esposito know she might be away for some days.

Walking the whole way from West 24th to Woolworth takes quite some time, but they have just enough left, so walk they do. They pick up hot dogs on the way, just as the sun sets behind the towering buildings of the city. The day came with a sudden mildness in temperature, but that’s draining out of the air again now, and Tina shivers a little even in her coat.

When they get to the Permit Office, Queenie’s just packing up for the day. It only takes her one good look at her sister’s face to know why Tina and Newt are stopping by. She’s distraught. “Last time we sent people after Grindelwald,” she says quietly, tightly, “nobody came back.”

Tina smiles. “We’re only going to see the Minister for Magic,” she replies, and hopes her Occlumency is good enough; though she never did get the hang of it entirely. Changing the direction of her thoughts works better, sometimes, so with firmness she says: “Will you check up on Modesty, if we’re longer than a few days?”

Queenie compresses her lips for a moment, with bright eyes. Then she smiles bravely. “Sure. I’ll go with Jacob. They can talk cinnamon measurements. He’s been experimenting, but personally I think he may be overdoing it a little now.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Ten seems like a good opportunity to say thank you thank you thank you to everyone who's left kudos or commented, it's honestly so wonderful to see you guys are enjoying this!
> 
> I also feel I should say that, while I up til now always had quite a bit of the next chapter drafted every time I posted ones, I've now run out of buffer. Which means I'll very likely be even slower to update than I usually am. I'm really sorry about that, but I really hope you guys will stick around anyway!
> 
> Next chapter, we'll be back with Seraphina. Tina is hijacking this whole thing, and while that's incredibly much fun, I also did have a different point here, really ... ^^

It’s very early morning in London when they arrive. By noon, they’re on their way again, through a fireplace and three Apparition points, seven hundred miles north.

Tina just has time, balancing on the uneven ground beside Newt, to survey the Hebridean landscape—oddly taken with the lonely, muted beauty of it—and to think, _So this is where you’ve been_ —before the first volley of curses comes out of nowhere, and scatters their group and her thoughts.

The ground is twigs, sharp pieces of bark, and stones, and they all bite into her palms as she throws out her hands to break her fall, and immediately pushes herself back to her feet. Fingers tight around her wand and catching her breath, she looks about for Newt, who was right next to her a moment ago.

He’s some feet away now, taking cover behind a boulder. Already looking back towards her.

They exchange a hasty nod to reassure each other they’re unhurt, and Tina hesitates only for a moment. She knows Newt can take care of himself: he’s dealt with beasts more dangerous and deadly than a handful of fanatics, all on his own, she tells herself. _That’s different than duelling_ , her own voice whispers in her head. _Yes, but you’ll have to trust_.

With resolve, she draws herself close to the barren tree she dove behind, the dead wood of its trunk dry and papery against her skin, and tries to locate what must be Grindelwald’s people, to count them—but she catches only glimpses, skirring and scampering figures, Apparating and Disapparating, blinked out of sight by blinding and shimmering bursts of magic.

Tina draws a deep breath, and darts out from behind her shield, aiming at the man nearest to her. He hasn’t noticed her, focussed on O’Brien who’s across from him, sixty or seventy feet away, which gives her the advantage over him. She stuns him, then moves on to the figure that comes into view behind him, a wiry woman whose features Tina makes out only fleetingly in the light from a curse that hits nearby: her face looks soft, and quite beautiful; quite unsuited to the cold obsessiveness in her eyes and the flash of green that erupts from her wand just before Tina disarms her.

Tina spins around, breath askew in her chest, to see who the woman was aiming for: if her Killing Curse hit home.

It’s one of Theseus’s people, _Caroline Biggs, pleased to meet you. What a lovely locket you’re wearing!_ Tina was surprised by the firmness of her handshake when they all introduced themselves to one another back in London.

Caroline has the delicacy of a doe, and evidently the agility and alertness to boot, because she’s crouched on the ground, the shoulder of her coat scorched and a rock behind her cloven in two.

Equal parts relieved and enraged, Tina puts extra feeling into the Stupefy she hurls at the originator of the Unforgivable. Then she moves on to the next opponent.

Any sense of time slips away as the fight continues: replaced by a constant thrum of magic and the cool island air prickling in her lungs. Tina tries to catch sight of Newt intermittently, as often as she can, and feels her throat go tight every time she doesn’t immediately find him.

She stops dead in her tracks, once, seeing him embroiled in a rapid duel that, just as she’s looking, seems to be going terribly awry. Then Newt sends a Petrificus Totalus at a clever angle, and his opponent hits the ground like a toppled statue—

—at the precise same moment that something wraps around Tina’s ankle and yanks. She stumbles, but manages to stay upright, and aims a mostly haphazard Repellent at the invisible tendril of magic closing ever more vice-like around her leg.

Her charm sets her free again, but whatever reached for her leaves, she thinks at first, an odd buzzing in her ears. Until she realises the sound is outside her head, not within. A murmuring, sonorous and dull, like massive movement in the forest or behind the cusp of the hillside.

Tina blocks a Stunner, and rejoins the fight, but as she keeps dodging curses, and taking out two more, then yet another of Grindelwald’s people, the sound ebbs and flows, registering time and again at the edges of her focus. She tries to place it, to decide if it’s the wind or the sea or something more sinister. But she doesn’t really have enough attention to spare to figure it out.

Until there’s a snap, distant, dry and hollow, but loud, and she spares too much of it anyway.

It’s for nothing but the bad aim of the wizard firing a Defodio at her that the spell only grazes her, leaving a scrape high on her cheek and a strand of her hair severed.

She ducks belatedly and swears, blinking rapidly against the sudden, stinging pain, focusing through her tears just in time to make out the next hex hurtling towards her. She rolls away, well out of reach, but her stomach goes tight, _not good not good_.

The man has singled her out, and if she doesn’t get her feet back under her and her defences up quick, it’ll be a matter of seconds before she can’t keep up anymore.

But on the treacherous ground, she doesn’t get the purchase she needs. A stone tips sideways beneath the sole of her shoe and, her instinct quicker than her wit, she lets herself drop back down to keep her ankle from twisting, instead of pushing herself up to sprint for cover.

She knows instantly that that’s sealed her fate: she’s out of time.

Except that the next surge of fizzling blue-tinged light aimed for her is derailed mid-flight, and the wizard attacking her crumples, a Binding Spell wrapped around him shoulders to shins. Suddenly, Tina has enough time again.

She scrambles back to her feet with a hammering heart and tries to see who got her out of this one, but there’s no telling: whoever it was is already knees-deep in another duel.

So she dives back in as well, and some minutes later finds herself side by side with Fenwick, helping her duel a crazed-seeming man flinging about Bone-Crushing hexes in a dangerously aimless manner. Tina is vaguely impressed by the colourful expletives Fenwick has in store for the wizard, until she begins to worry about the amount of attention he’s commanding from both of them.

But then they hit him squarely in the chest, one Stunner each, and that’s that.

They both take a moment to catch their breath, and Fenwick scans the battlefield through narrowed eyes. “What the hell are we fighting over?” she asks. Her dark curls are tangled and wild as the scowl on her face: she’s all fierceness, and Tina briefly wonders if anything ever doesn’t look good on this woman. “Are they guarding Grindelwald?”

“I’ve no idea,” Tina says. “Must be, don’t they?”

“So he’s a coward, yeah?”

Tina grins. She’s not so sure, but there’s no denying that insulting the bad guy is good for morale at moments like this. ~~~~

Then she reaches out reflexively, catching Fenwick by the sleeve as the woman’s about to move away again.

“You hear that?”

The strange rumbling she’s been dimly aware of this whole time has suddenly swollen to a roar, sounding desperately close all at once, like a storm rushing in in time lapse.

Before Fenwick can reply, or Tina can begin to make sense of the change, a tree, gnarled and with a crown like a sprawling maze, burst into splinters and wood dust perhaps a hundred feet from the battlefield, and the black sandstorm mass of the obscurus surges across the hillside.

Tina recoils on reflex, and gasps.

_He’s really alive!_ , she thinks, _He’s really alive!_ But her exhilaration quickly mingles with trepidation, because of course this isn’t just Credence. It’s not just a lost, lonely boy, but also immense dark power, and fear, and fury, and raw pain. And they all seem to have increased tenfold since the day in December in New York.

Tina feels a prickling on her skin that has nothing to do with the cool northern air. She realises that part of her had hoped against hope that Credence wouldn’t really be here: that Grindelwald had just dragged his posse here as a search party, that Credence had followed Newt and Graves south after all, and was hiding somewhere far away from all this.

The obscurus tears furrows into the ground as it traverses the battlefield, sending people diving out of the way and running for cover in every direction. It looks denser than she remembers, darker, more massive.

Beside her, Fenwick curses again, but it sounds much weaker than just a few minutes ago.

“I thought,” she says, “the obscurus was supposed to be _weaker_. Significantly?”

“Yeah,” Tina replies eloquently. This really isn’t what she, what anyone, was expecting; and she doesn’t want to think about what it could mean.

“Is Grindelwald controlling it?”

Tina shakes her head. _Please no. Probably yes._ “I don’t know.”

Around them, the duelling subsides entirely as everyone is poised, focused on the obscurus, watching and gauging. Tina just wishes she knew if in Grindelwald’s people, it’s in apprehension, or anticipation.

At the opposite side of the slope from Tina and Fenwick, the obscurus topples to a halt, curling in on itself against a scattering of rocks like a crashed and stranded storm cloud.

For a moment, Tina can’t make sense of why it’s stopped there. Then she sees Graves not far away from it, and she thinks, _Thank God_ , because surely that means Credence still recognises them, and is fighting any influence Grindelwald may already have gained over him; and knows not everyone here wants to catch him and put him on a leash and use and hurt him.

Picquery is just some feet behind Graves, and she turns her back on the obscurus now, eyes, Tina hazards, on the hilltop from behind which the obscurus exploded out. She gestures for Ludlow, close by, to come to her, and a moment later he and one of Theseus’s aurors Disapparate. To scout for traces of Grindelwald beyond the battlefield, Tina has no doubt.

Then something bright bursts somewhere, and a spell Tina can’t identify hurtles in a high arch towards the obscurus. It shatters against a shield that Graves must have drawn up, perhaps to protect the President rather than Credence, but that hardly makes a difference just then.

Picquery sends a Cascading Jinx into the group of Grindelwald’s cronies from amidst which the curse came, sending them all flying backwards like a handful of puppets. None of them get up again from where they land sprawled on the ground, but the first spell’s set the gears in motion again, all across the battlefield, unstoppably.

The obscurus billows and shivers. Tina has no idea if Graves was trying to talk to Credence. But whether or not he did, whether or not it was doing any good, it’s certainly for nothing now.

There’s one more moment of suspense before the obscurus erupts skyward, then comes diving back down—towards whoever there is on the ground, but also towards the men and women Picquery just knocked out. Tina’s breath catches in her throat as the force of the obscurus drags them along, still more like ragdolls than before, and discards them only a good hundred feet further on.

_Oh Credence,_ Tina thinks desperately, _stop stop stop._ She wants to scream, to shout to him to just flee, just get away from here, hide somewhere, wait for her and Newt, for Graves, _but stop hurting people_.

And then it’s all she can do to throw herself on the ground as the obscurus jackknives, and comes rushing straight towards her at a speed that catches her off guard.

She lands a lot more softly than she was bracing herself for, and realises—petrol blue as she blinks and the smell of nature, but warm—that her head has ended up cushioned on Newt’s arm. His other arm is wrapped around her, tightly, his body pressed against hers like a shield as the obscurus dashes past above them.

Everything in Tina goes tight and sharp until she can wriggle free and twist around to look at Newt, and make sure he didn’t get hurt.

A moment ago, she thinks a wildly, he was nowhere near her. She didn’t even know _where_ he was. (It crosses her mind that this seems to be turning into a pattern.) He must have Apparated to her when he saw the obscurus race towards her, and it makes her want to kiss him and shake sense into him all at once.

“ _Newt_ ,” she starts (squeaks, if she’s honest), fully meaning to be outraged—but her intentions scatter away as they both realise how close they suddenly are to the obscurus.

It’s spilled into a cluster of trees mere feet away from them, strung out between the branches like glimmering, dark cobweb. It coils and undulates, magic rolling off of it so densely, Tina can feel it like the heat of a wildfire. It’s truly frightening.

Newt wraps his hand around hers tightly, and Tina looks over her shoulder at Fenwick, just back on her feet herself.

“Don’t attack him, Libby,” she says, well aware how insane it sounds at this point. “Whatever you do.”

Fenwick, her eyes large and unblinking, glances over at her and nods, if a little forcedly—and, Tina suspects, provisionally.

Her eyes slip past her colleague, drawn to the moving figures in the middle distance: Grindelwald’s henchmen closing in. Fenwick, bless her, notices too, and evidently decides that if she’s not to fire spells at the scary thing in front of her, she might just as well pretend it isn’t there and concentrate on people she _can_ attack.

Beside Tina, Newt calls out to Credence, and she turns back around, leaving their defence in Fenwick’s hands for now.

Newt’s voice is gentle, steady, and sure. Tina doesn’t know if that’s all it takes, or if it’s coincidence: that the obscurus pulls in on itself then, and begins to strain downwards towards the ground like some shadowy gossamer fabric slipping off long-unused furniture.

Newt squeezes her hand, and then lets go of it. “Talk to him, Tina,” he mutters, and she doesn’t know why he’s moving away from her until a spell, fizzling bright and fanning out like a cat-o’-nine-tails, scourges the ground nearby.

Tina draws a deep breath and forces herself to stay focussed on Credence. She shouts his name, tells him that _we’ll help you, Credence, please trust me, I promise this time we’ll protect you, you just have get away from all these_ people—and repeats her words over and over, praying and almost believing already that it’ll work and they’ll be able to take Credence away from all this forever in just a few more moments, just a few more moments, he just as to knit himself back together and then—

But it doesn’t play out like that.

What happens before her is, at first, painful to watch: spells rain down around them as Grindelwald’s people seem to have decided that riling the obscurus enough to either kill everyone here, or at least force the aurors to flee, is a strategy worth risking; and it frightens Credence deeply, no matter that Newt and Fenwick are doing all they can to repel the attacks and thin out the attackers.

The obscurus tears this way and that reflexively, convulsively, but Credence is trying, trying so very hard, to return to his human shape.

Only somehow, he doesn’t.

The sandy wisps of black magic wind themselves tight, like ropes, and shape limbs, a neck, a head— Tina thinks she makes out Credence’s sharp features. But it’s the barest glimpse and the image of his face tears apart, like a portrait ripped to shreds of paper that can bleed.

Tina feels something in her turn cold as she watches, transfixed and utterly horrified by the violence of what she’s witnessing.

There’s a flash of bone-white, a skull like a Halloween trick: there then gone; a net of strings, threads, a tangle shaped like an arm, fingers, a shoulder—blood vessels, Tina realises, and the pearly shimmer of sinews trying to attach to bone. A femur and a tibia, a spine. She sees teeth, and a jaw joint widening as Credence screams. There’s no sound, and the jaw opens way too wide, the angle unnatural—then the bone splinters and disappears.

Tina can’t comprehend what she’s seeing. She shouts Credence’s name again, but her voice trembles now and keeps cracking, and if he heard her before, she can tell that he doesn’t anymore now.

She stumbles a little taking a step back, and hates herself for just a moment, just a little, for the relief it gives her to turn her eyes away and look for Newt.

He’s behind her, trying to shield Credence and her, but he’s seen what she saw too.

“What’s happening?” Tina asks, not sure if it came out even loud enough for him to hear.

Apparently it did, but Newt only shakes his head. He turns back around to face Grindelwald’s people, but too late: a curse flies past them both, some twisted unintelligible thing with too much power, and the obscurus explodes away from the trees, tearing them down like matchsticks and burning them to shards of coal as it goes.

Tina’s instincts tell her that this is it, that it’s over. And she’s right.

From that point onward, everything moves too fast. The obscurus lashes out in all directions, narrowly missing Caroline, who drops to the ground and covers her head with her arms as pebbles, soil, and forest debris spray about her.

The auror some feet behind her isn’t as quick. Tina sees the fabrics of his clothes shred, and then the skin of his arm, elbow to wrist, wand clattering away. She hears his scream and turns away: suddenly she can’t stand it anymore.

But she doesn’t feel the pull of true panic until the moment O’Brien is hit. It was a hex, not the obscurus, but she can’t immediately see if it’s just a graze, or if it’s bad, and then she loses sight of him.

She reaches out for Newt’s hand again, barely caring that it’s encumbering to both of them. She only thinks how she can’t lose him, no matter what comes next now, and it’s like a mantra in her head, _stay with me stay with me._

Through the noise around them, Tina hears Picquery’s voice, recognises the tone of command; but it takes several repetitions before she can make the words out enough to understand that the President’s ordering them to retreat to the rendevouz point.

It’s the only thing to do, but it’s the worst: everyone hesitates, no one will be the first to Disapparte, to leave their comrades to fend for themselves, but there’s never a moment when it’s clear everyone can get out safely.

Tina finds O’Brien again, still on the ground, but with Ventresca and Graves beside him. Graves stands and he must be ordering the two aurors away, because Ventresca finally grabs O’Brien’s arm, and they vanish.

Theseus sends a small cluster of his people after them and when Ludlow and his fellow scout reappear, Picquery sends them right on: it’s like the three of them are picking hale pieces of wood out of a raging fire.

The obscurus, Credence, is mindless now.

Enough that Grindelwald’s people, too, have left off trying to goad it. One or two of them—the completely insane ones, it can’t be any other way—cast ropes of magic, nets of Binding Spells and Stunners and Immobuli at it, but it’s to no effect other than one of them paying dearly for her attempts at catching the obscurus.

Tina realises only later, in hindsight, when she has time and peace to go over everything slowly, that Credence didn’t notice, or didn’t recognise Picquery at first: the woman that ordered twenty aurors to kill him.

An easy mistake to make. She looks utterly different here, in the wilderness and the middle of blooming chaos, her bright hair not wrapped up and her clothes the same kind as everyone else’s.

But at long last he recognises her anyway, and the moment he does, he goes for her.

Tina doesn’t blame him, but she screams her lungs out trying stop him.

If the obscurus kills the President, there’ll be no way anyone can protect Credence.

Picquery is one of the most powerful witches alive. She’s fine.

Until, because nobody is invincible, she isn’t.

Someone who really shouldn’t, catches on and involves her in a rapid duel that takes up some of her attention; but then there’s three people all attacking her, and at some point, something’s got to give.

The moment Tina realises what’s happening, she also realises it’s too late to stop it.

Then the ground tears away from under her feet and everything turns snow white.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come talk to me [on tumblr](whatifimacrowdeddesert.tumblr.com), if you like!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go. It's been a while, I know ... if anyone is actually waiting for updates on this one, I do apologise! I'm hoping the next chapter will be up quicker. I've been travelling a lot, still am, but not for much longer, so hopefully I'll have more time again soon. On the other hand, the holidays are on the horizon ... I'll do my best, though!! 
> 
> A huge thank you to everyone who's been leaving kudos or commenting! I love to hear what you all think, so ... don't stop? :)

Seraphina hits the ground so hard that she feels the impact in every bone, like a curse someone really meant. The light that bursts around her has the intensity of a magnesium fire and she squeezes her eyes shut against it, but to little avail: it stays, like a coat of paint across the insides of her eyelids, bleeding into her mind.

For a moment, she wrestles the brightness for a clear thought, but it’s a losing battle and she’s pulled downward, until she’s back in New York City: seven years in the past.

Inauguration Day. Bright as bells.

The _Ghost_ likened it to what they were expecting, hoping her presidency would be: bright, new. Fresh after a particularly dreary, long winter, and the dull years of losses in the war.

She was beautiful, exquisite she’d been called, by lovers up close and the press from afar, before the election shifted what was acceptable vocabulary to apply to her.

She knew it had helped her. Young and exquisite, Horned Serpent by choice: bright.

When it was nearly morning, her new life hours away, she and Graves stood next to each other on a rooftop, watching the city, a tapestry of deep shadows dotted with light. He’d already been DMLE for close on two years, ridiculously young for it, and she could have been jealous if she hadn’t set her sights on something else. She’d told him as much when he’d been appointed, and he’d laughed and replied that _if you’d wanted this for yourself, I wouldn’t have it now_.

She didn’t think so, but she thought he really did. She suspected he set a little too much store by her endlessly cited, endlessly marvelled-at arrival at Ilvermorny; and that her and him were, in fact, quite perfect complements, with all the necessary differences between them to make them so, and that they were each right where they were supposed to be. She didn’t say that, then. Mostly because she liked being complimented, and because she wasn’t the President just yet.

Two years later, on the rooftop, she noticed a somewhat unexpected bittersweet taste on her lips.

She hooked her cool fingers together and said: “You’ve got to promise me one thing, Graves. No matter what happens in the next four years. The next eight years, if I don’t screw this up.” She paused, wondering if she was about to sound very silly. And then finished anyway: “Don’t die because of me.”

Maybe she was only half serious; though she supposed that if she’d tried to tell herself that, her own voice would have been giving her the lie.

Maybe it was the war talking, stuck in all their bones: the bleak, sickening reality of it that seemed like a tattoo sometimes, uncouth and permanent. People disappearing from others’ lives without warning all the time. She chose to assume that that was it, perhaps because it was easier than admitting that some facts of her new life—like that there were people now who had to protect her with their lives—freaked her out.

Graves was leaning on the parapet, and she’d have given a penny for his thoughts. She’d noticed recently that he was becoming more opaque to her. She didn’t like that much.

But he looked at her when she’d finished speaking, and at least then, she thought she could keep her pennies: she recognised the teasing at the corners of his eyes, the joke in the curve of his lips. About how _I can either do my job properly, or stay holed up behind my desk all day. What’s it gonna be, Picquery?_

To which she might have replied, _It is, properly, a desk job, Graves,_ and they’d have easily bantered the whole thing away because all of that was true and it wouldn’t have been about them, only their jobs.

Or he was going to ask, _When did you get so sentimental, Seraphina?_

But he didn’t say it, nor the next thing he wanted to, no playfulness in the lines of his face: _But I would_.

What he did say, was, “Promise.”

She knew as well as him that it was lip service even if he meant it: the kind of promise people—soldiers, aurors, and apparently presidents—took from each other to make life more coherent, and sleep easier. The kind of irrationality she prided herself on being immune to. Keeping such promises was purely a matter of luck.

Seraphina has been wondering for some time now if their luck’s been running out.

The memory snaps apart around that thought, and Seraphina blinks. There’s a burning tightness in her chest that confuses her for several moments, until she realises she’s stopped breathing. The first rush of air, once she manages to jumpstart her lungs, is like broken glass down her throat.

She coughs and rolls onto her side, a dull ache flaring in her shoulder. _That’ll bruise_. Everything around her is still overexposed, clear lines and colours coalescing only slowly. But she can make out Graves, maybe three feet from her: not close enough for her to swat him on the arm as emphatically as she’d like, but she does what she can.

“Morgana’s tits, Graves.”

He laughs, a bit like he doesn’t have the breath for it either, but it eases Seraphina’s mind. _This could have gone wrong_ , and she really isn’t ready for that, not again. Not for a while.

She wipes at her eyes and thinks that she’d like to stay where she is, just for a minute or so, let the last of the haze clear away, and catch her breath; but the cold of the ground is fast creeping through her clothes, into her limbs. It’s pleasant against the adrenaline and the heat of the fight only briefly; then it starts to hurt. The temperature must well below zero.

With about 9,000 feet of ice beneath them, that of course isn’t a surprise.

So Seraphina pushes herself up onto her knees and rescues her wand from a miniature snowdrift that it’s become half submerged in. She casts an Insulating Charm over herself and Graves, trying to chafe a little extra warmth into it, and scans their surroundings. The landscape is so immaculately uniform that it almost baffles the eye. Seraphina squints against the sameness, worried she’ll miss something in this reverse forest-for-the-trees _trompe l’oeil_. But after a few moments, with some relief she spots two dark, blurry dots, perhaps half a mile away.

_Not bad_ , she thinks, _considering_.

Beside her, Graves sits up too, and with a muffled sound somewhere between annoyed and pained, immediately doubles over. With the awkward movement, Seraphina suddenly notices the blood, incongruously red on the feather-white snow between them.

“Percival.” She reflexively reaches out to pull away the hand he’s holding pressed to his face. His palm is covered in blood, and his nose and lips and chin.

Her first, wild thought is that she wasn’t fast enough after all, that the obscurus caught him as it was coming for her—before she remembers that there’d be significantly more blood, and possibly fewer limbs, if that were the case. _Curse_ , she thinks next, one that was aimed for her, God knows there were enough of those flying about. But when she feels for the dark-magic residue that would prove her right, she finds only the wisps and dissipating traces that any fight will leave behind.

Which is reassuring. Not that a fractured skull wouldn’t be a problem.

“What’s wrong?” Seraphina asks. “Did you hit your head?”

Graves finally looks up at her and then, pointedly, at the landscape stretching out around them in a barely undulating expanse of snow and weak shadows like bleached ghosts: flat and uninterrupted in every direction, all the way to the horizon that circles them.

“On what?”

Seraphina studies him sceptically, but she supposes she has to concede that point.

“Maybe we grazed the Faroes on the way?”

Graves snorts. He seems a little giddy, she realises, dazed just as she was when she came to, but with a strange edge to it.

“That’ll have been it.” He sniffs, and then Vanishes the blood. “I’m fine.”

Seraphina hums, unconvinced. That Cleaning Charm alone, she thinks, was proof enough to the contrary. It was so brittle, she’s surprised it even did its job.

She watches him press the back of his hand to his nose again experimentally, but the bleeding seems to have stopped. On the tip of her tongue, words accumulate like thistles. She’d whack him again if her arms didn’t feel so heavy.

“You promised me,” she says, with all the tiny bristles on the words, “that you wouldn’t do anything stupid because of me. Do you remember that, Graves?”

She honestly isn’t sure if he does. The night on the rooftop, surely. Waiting out the break of dawn like there was more meaning to it than the simple fact of a new morning.

Both of them keenly aware of who they were to each other: the President and her DMLE. Still friends, still colleagues. Not lovers anymore.

Not that any of it came out of the lightening midnight blue of the sky. A good six months of campaigning were behind her, and neither of them had doubted that she’d win the election. But now it was here and real and it was like something tangible filling up the two feet of space between them, and Seraphina wasn’t used yet to it being quite that solid.

She wondered what the next years were going to be, and what they would have been if she wasn’t, now, the President. She surprised herself with the wondering: it wasn’t like her, never had been, she had too much determination, too much focus. But the night just had that kind of crossroads feel to it.

She thinks Graves wondered, too.

So surely he remembers all that, the hour or two above the waking city and the crisp air with the promise of spring in it. But the promise she asked for, with all its whimsical, inevitable emptiness, may well just have been a conversational tag to him, and she knows she couldn’t in good conscience blame him if it was.

She hardly expected it to become such an acute memory herself.

“No,” Graves says, “I never promised that, exactly. He rubs absently at a speck of blood on his wrist that the Charm missed or that overwhelmed it at last. “But I didn’t die, did I?”

Seraphina arches an eyebrow. “No thanks to yourself,” she points out flatly.

Graves inclines his head, with that damned smirk she knows so well, but then he runs his hand over his face and seems to wipe it right off.

“No,” he says, simply. The word sounds like something large and heavy had squashed the volume out of it.

Seraphina was expecting a comeback, the first retort in the kind of argument they’ve had a hundred times through all their years: both serious and not, when they’ve been unhappy with each other’s decisions or methods, knowing full well from the start that neither of them was wrong or would budge. Arguing for the sake of it, and also for the sake of something else.

With the same feeling that waking up and unscrambling a dream and reality sometimes brings, Seraphina thinks that she missed that. Like she did a whole lot of other things she spent the past months making sure stayed stowed away in a backroom of her mind, where they couldn’t smart or make her wonder.

She’s more than ready to go back to normal, but Graves clearly isn’t about to indulge her nostalgia: she can tell that his thoughts are winding themselves into a whole separate strand of the past.

So she makes the effort after all, ignores the slushy weight of cold and exhaustion in her limbs, and cuffs him on the shoulder once more.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she asks, mostly just to be talking, to take up more space than whatever it is Graves is remembering or grappling with.

It seems to work. He shrugs lightly. “I reckoned that Credence wouldn’t go over my dead body.”

“Oh, did you?” Credence Barebone knows what was happening those last two days in December, before everything went up in flames, pieces of New York City flying about all their heads. He knows the man that betrayed him wasn’t Graves. That much became clear out on the hillside in Scotland. So perhaps Graves’s calculation wasn’t entirely hare-brained. Still.

“You have a lot of faith in the breaking distance of that thing.”

He laughs. “Yeah, maybe,” and it still irks her a little that, apparently, that’s that. But she’s too well aware that he has nothing on her for recklessness in this situation, to say anything else.

Graves drops his hands and looks towards the horizon, towards the two dark dots growing steadily larger, drawing steadily closer. “You brought us a long way,” he says softly. “You’re okay?”

Seraphina huffs, and rolls her eyes, fondly. _Just look at us,_ she thinks. “I’m fine.”

Graves nods. “Well,” he says after a moment, “it’s freezing, Madam President. You couldn’t have picked someplace else? Sicily, say?”

“ _You Apparated_ between me and a charging obscurus, Percival. I wasn’t putting much thought into the _where to_ of getting away.” She pauses, and then deflates somewhat. _Haven’t you noticed I’ve no idea what I’m doing anymore?_

“And besides. We know someone here.”

“You know someone everywhere.”

“That’s true. But not anyone like Carlotta.”

Graves’s eyes narrow, before he smiles with a shake of his head. “Right. _Not much thought_ , was it?”

Seraphina shrugs, perhaps a tad smugly. Then she shivers: her Charm gradually running out of power, reminding her that Graves indeed isn’t the only one who’s been overtaxing their magic some. She chafes her hands and hopes fervently that she can still concentrate hers enough to find out exactly where they are on this monochrome stretch of icy wastes.

And that she remembers her incantations.

She closes her eyes, searching through her memory for the formula of spells she learned years and years and years ago, _should have practiced once in a while, cara_ , but honestly, who would have seen this coming?

It takes a frustrating minute or two, but finally, before her mind’s eye, the shimmer she’s been waiting for appears, and when she blinks, it’s there on the snow, too: a gently weaving ribbon of pale, luminescent colours, like a terrestrial aurora borealis, showing the way.

The thrum of anxiety leaves her body, and with it almost all tension, including the one that keeps her sitting upright. It’s her tiredness redoubled, but at least it’s the good kind.

“I don’t think it’s far,” she says, and thinks of tea with grappa, almonds, and jasmine.

Graves can’t see the weave of glimmering light she’s conjured, but he follows her gaze anyway. “That’s good to know,” he says. “And impressive.” Seraphina shrugs again.

A short distance away, the two dots have morphed into human shapes, and it’s only some more moments before Tina Goldstein and Newt Scamander reach them—breathless, rumpled, and dusted in white like they were just shaken out of a no-maj snow globe, but, thankfully, all in one piece.

“Excuse me,” Scamander says in his usual manner. Like it’s all quite all right, really, he just isn’t entirely sure—“Where are we, exactly?”

Next to Seraphina, Graves has stood up, and she accepts his hand and lets him pull her to her feet.

“Greenland,” she says, patting snow off her coat. “Some seven hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.”

“That explains the temperature,” Goldstein says, through chattering teeth. Then something else registers. “You Apparated us to Greenland?” She gapes at Seraphina in a way that undoubtedly will make her blush in about two seconds. Seraphina is used to it. She’s been getting such looks from a long line of people since before she learned to speak her first spell.

Scamander, by contrast, only looks a bit puzzled, until his eyes begin to light up. “Right in the middle of the Ice Sheet,” he adds, realisation clearly dawning. He looks at Goldstein with barely concealed excitement, then back at Seraphina. “We’re at Orserfia. Aren’t we?”

Seraphina nods. “Almost, at least. It should be about a mile that way.” She gestures along the trajectory of her spellwork’s Northern Lights. “I suggest we hurry. That’ll keep us warm.”

*

Tina slips her hand back into Newt’s as they walk, warming spells wrapped tightly around them like chunky handknit scarves. The snow beneath their soles crunches deliciously, but Tina’s mind is too scattered to find the sound comforting. She’s still a little baffled by the sudden absence of chaos (or anything, for that matter) around her, a little dismayed at having been torn away from her comrades, her friends, Credence, all left to fend for themselves.

Newt, she thinks, must be worrying about Credence. And about his brother. But he seems to have decided that fretting over what might be happening thousands of miles away will bring him nothing but heartache, seeing as Apparating back isn’t an option, not for most people anyway. So he’s turning his mind to what lies immediately ahead, and about that, he’s clearly excited.

“What’s Orserfia? The name rings a bell, I’m sure I’ve heard it before, but I can’t place it.”

Newt smiles. Tina’s eyes have been trained on the ground, just ahead of her own feet, since they started along some invisible path the President has somehow picked out; as if narrowing her vision might help focus her thoughts. She’s begun to feel drained, the rush of the recent fight seeping out of her, replaced mostly by worry, and exhaustion. But Newt is looking straight ahead, past Picquery and Graves, as if he’s waiting for something amazing to appear out of thin air any moment. (Which, to be fair, probably is precisely what’s about to happen.) Tina can’t help smiling along, soaking up at least a little of Newt’s evident curiosity.

“It’s a research facility,” Newt explains. “It goes back to, ah, sometime in the 1700s, I believe? And a handful of people looking for somewhere safe to try out some big spells they’d thought up. Nothing enduring came of it then, and for a while, there was nothing here again except for a hole in the ice that they’d left.” He pauses, and absently rubs the back of Tina’s hand with his thumb. “There’s a lot of magic in the ice, old power, and it’s easier to tap than elsewhere. This far north, you know, and with almost no man-made interferences. Well, then eventually someone else needed a place with an easy power outlet, where strange lights in the sky wouldn’t strike any muggles as particularly suspicious, and this came to mind. That was Elaine Caldwell, if I’m not mixing things up.”

“The one with the massive defence enchantments?”

“Which she developed here, yes. Although she’s actually better known to some for her work on the indigenous magic of Greenland, than her wards. She got into the former while collaborating with local magicfolk on the latter, and ended up staying here for over a decade. She wrote all her books here. Well, and from there on, the place just grew. Now it hosts projects that are too risky for anywhere closer to muggle settlements. Or too delicate or large for other facilities.”

“And you’ve been here before?”

“Oh, no. I’d always have liked to take a peek at their library, but they have a fairly strict admissions policy, and my research just doesn’t really fit the profile.” He frowns a little. “Although I wonder …”

“What?” Tina prompts, after she’s given him a moment and concluded he’s not about to elaborate. But any answer is forgotten as they pass through the magical barrier they were bound to encounter eventually. It’s mostly strong Disillusionment Charms, like gauze or cobweb, thin and soft and giving way easily; but there’s also something else woven in, silvery threads criss-crossing, that put up a little more resistance before they, too, brush off.

Tina doesn’t have time to figure out what precisely the pattern is set up to do, nor the inclination. Now, she’s more interested in what’s before her, too. She’d half expected the temperature to change, the air to become softer, less sharp once they’d crossed the perimeter; perhaps she even expected a patch of green, something like an oasis in the desert.

It isn’t quite like that. The air doesn’t change at all, still prickling even through the protective glove of their Cozy Charms. The ground is still unforgivingly frozen and barren, although there is some flora – maybe. Shapes like boxwood and pygmy cypresses are dotted here and there, but Tina is puzzled by their lack of colour, by the textures she thinks she can recognise, that make her want to touch what she sees to find out what it is. The trees look completely frosted, like something Jacob might have made and lathered in Swiss meringue, and Tina wonders if there’s something living underneath the icing at all.

The building is small, a single-story structure, grey stone dusty with cold. It looks pretty—perpendicular windows, a gabled if disproportionally flat roof, and a colonnade running along the wall, all around the house as far as Tina can tell. But it also looks somehow squat, like a stocky little dragon that’s rolled itself up small and compact in hopes of going unnoticed. And like a dragon’s tail, the colonnade detaches itself from the wall at one point, and bends across the ice, ending in a circular platform of the same blocks of slate that make up everything else.

“Portkey pad,” Picquery says as they take the two flat steps onto the platform and turn into the colonnade; and then: “Oh, thank Merlin they’ve gotten rid of the garden gnomes.”

Newt perks up immediately. “Is there a local species?”

Picquery chuckles, and Tina nearly trips over her own feet. She can count the times she’s seen the President smile (good-naturedly) at somebody on the fingers of one hand. Let alone laugh. That Newt and his fascination for fantastic beasts and disregard for American ownership law should add to that number, is more than unexpected, not to say bewildering.

“No, Mr. Scamander,” Madam Picquery answers. “They were clay gnomes. Brought along by some German magiscientist who thought they were droll, like he did anything to do with no-majs catching glimpses of our world and spinning tales or terracotta around them. Apparently, no-majs like to have them in their gardens. They looked like misshapen ghosts out here.”

“Oh,” Newt says, but he seems less disappointed by not having discovered an unknown variety of gnome, than amused by the insight into no-maj customs.

Then the colonnade rejoins the building and brings them up to a door, made of some pearly wood and carved with geometric symbols that surely hold their own magic. It opens just as they reach it, spilling warm light at their feet, and revealing a short, fine-boned woman in beach pyjamas and a silk coat, evidently come out to meet them.

As though she were entirely of this place, she has grey hair, pulled back into an elegant twist at the nape of her neck, and grey eyes. But while everything else Tina has so far seen out here, has been dull under the weight of the forbidding cold, her eyes have a glint to them.

She smiles when she sees Picquery, and spreads out her arms to embrace her. “Hello, _cara_ ,” she says, like this visit had been planned for weeks and months, and had finally come.

“Hello Carlotta.” Picquery returns the embrace, and from the line of her shoulders, it looks like she lets go of some of the tension that always seems to suffuse her whole body. “Apologies for turning up unannounced,” she says. “We were in a bit of a scrape.”

Carlotta holds the President at arm’s length and gives her a look that spells exasperation and fondness. “I should hope so.”

Then she looks past Picquery at the rest of their party. “Well, it’s a bit nippy out here,” she remarks. “As usual. And you all look a little windswept, so why don’t we find us something hot to drink? Then you can tell me what brought you here.”

_I’d like to know_ , Tina thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Orserfia_ is a Greenlandic word, and I wanted to add a quick explanatory / apologetic note about this. I don’t speak Greenlandic, and either I was being exceptionally dumb about it, or it’s really tricky to find English-Greenlandic translations online. The dictionary website I did use was [this one](http://www.freelang.net/online/greenlandic.php?lg=gb); but a) most words I tried to look up didn’t seem to be in there and b) if I’d had the words, I’d have mangled the grammar beyond recognition. So I ended up clicking through random words. One of those was described to mean “the opening in a lamp through which it is filled with oil.” And that’s orserfia.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter before the year's out! Not much happening here, but I hope it'll be ok anyway.
> 
> Happy New Year everyone!

“Last time we spoke,” Carlotta says, “you said you were sure that you had destroyed that obscurus.”

Picquery nods and tucks a lock of her hair back. Tina’s never seen her like this. Without a headdress, once: at a charity function where Tina was part of the security detail, just some months after she’d started at MACUSA. But that was a glamorous affair. Now, the President’s white curls are in disarray—elegant disarray, for sure, but still. It makes her look less like an icon, less rigid, warmer.

She’s been talking more with her hands since they sat down here, too. Which Tina thinks is an odd thing—does she usually stand with her fingers interlaced, or steepled on her desk, her conference table, a stack of files, so she won’t be too animate, too alive?

Tina presses her own hands to the warm porcelain between her palms. She only realised how cold she actually was when they stepped through the ash-grey door that Carlotta had opened to them, and for the first ten or so minutes, she didn’t take in much besides the fireside-warmth of this place, and its colours that were like balmy honey after the stark whiteness of the ice of Greenland and the winter sky above it.

Oserfia was, at first, only a hexagonal hall, the walls lined with lamps, statues, and tapestries, and the ceiling an artwork of painted beams and a skylight Tina could have sworn was made of ice. In the middle of the hall was a circular structure that turned out to be a wide double spiral, winding downwards in satiny, turned and carved rosewood. Carlotta led them one coil down, then along a hallway or two and around a few corners, into a room with a sandstone fireplace and large came glasswork windows nestled between bookshelves, looking out at a mirror image of the vast white landscape above.

Whether to welcome them, or permanently, a fire was stoked, and Tina felt herself come back to her body. With that, however, the pain of the burn that the curse had left on her cheek also began to finally manifest, sharp enough to make her wince and mutter a dismayed _ow_ —under her breath, she thought, but clearly not out of their host’s earshot.

“Oh, yes,” Carlotta said, “that looks painful,” and summoned a pot of salve from one of the many, mysterious nooks of this place, offering it to Tina. “Just a little bit,” she told her, and then went to talk to the President and Graves by the window while Tina fiddled with the pot in her still half-numb fingers until Newt took it out of her hand. He dabbed salve on her cheek gently, but in quite a practiced manner, focused and all business, and Tina hand to bite her lip to keep from smiling all the harder for it. She did smile outright anyway when a moment later, he seemed to notice what he was doing (or possibly, that this was Tina, not Cordelia the nundu), and suddenly blushed.

Newt was wonderfully distracting, and the cream blissfully cooling and numbing. Feeling much better, Tina followed Newt on a stroll along one or two book cases, though she herself was more taken with the architecture of the room, the detail, and the suspicion that was creeping upon her that much of this building was, in fact, ice. Ice and magic.

A few minutes later an elf in flannel pants and a knit pullover arrived with a tray of sweet almond biscuits and coffee so strong and bitter Tina was sure the first sip shrivelled her taste buds; but after the second it became surprisingly grounding and refreshing, finally clearing the frost from her mind.

They’re all on their second cup by now (even Newt, which is certainly owing much more to frosted fingers and thoughts, than taste), and clustered around a table of polished walnut and perpetually twirling and wandering shell inlay, a pattern of leaves and vines trying their hardest to steal pieces of caramel-coloured rock sugar from a glass bowl, but tragically confined to the furniture level.

Picquery absently traces the progress of one of the corkscrew tendrils with her eyes, then puts a fingertip in its path, causing it to back up into itself.

“I _was_ sure,” she says. “We had no reason to suspect the obscurus hadn’t been obliterated. But Grindelwald must have been aware, somehow, of the contrary.”

Carlotta hums thoughtfully. With a quick, fluid gesture, she coaxes two lumps of sugar from their bowl and into her cup, and sends the liquid swirling gently. She seems much more like an artist than a scientist, Tina thinks. In her embroidered eggshell silk, she looks like she’s all for leisure, and her voice puts Tina in mind of late nights and cocktails, strings of cigarettes and pearls, pealing laughter and hazy rooms. It’s difficult to reconcile with reading dry papers at conferences and lecturing on … Magic and Magnetism, or some such. Then Tina chides herself—at the very least since meeting Newt, she should know better than to lump all science together under the label ‘dusty-dry and narcotic,’ and all scientists under something similarly ungracious.

“So,” Carlotta says, “the obscurus was severely diminished after your confrontation in New York, it followed Mr. Scamander all the way to Scotland—then what happened to it?”

Picquery takes her hand away, and the shell vine bounces on like a startled snake, upsetting a cluster of leaves. Tina swears she can hear faint rustling as a shiver begins to slowly spread across the entire tabletop.

“Whatever it was, must have been Grindelwald's doing. The obscurus didn't grow to that extent all but overnight by itself.”

“No,” Carlotta agrees, “it seems unlikely.”

Tina shifts in her seat and thinks of the hillside, the chaos around her, the obscurus, and Fenwick a few feet away, wondering—

“Does that mean Grindelwald’s controlling Credence?”

Across from her, Graves shakes his head. He hasn’t said much since they sat down here, and has let Picquery, and Newt and Tina herself, do most of the explaining. Now he says, “Grindelwald’s people were there to catch the obscurus. He’s not controlling him.”

The _Yet_ remains unspoken, and hangs in the air between them all like a little iceberg.

Picquery leans forward and props her arms on the table. Tina suddenly notices that the knuckles of her right hand are scraped, blood crusting on them. Reflexively, she looks around the table, and for just a moment has to fight down a laugh. They really do all look a little windswept, as Carlotta euphemistically put it. _Look at us_ , Tina thinks, and feels a million miles away from her normal life.

“Carlotta,” Picquery begins, “do you think there's a way that Grindelwald could have grafted another obscurus to the boy’s?”

“Another obscurus?” Carlotta repeats. She frowns curiously at Picquery, as if to prompt an explanation, but when none is offered, she shrugs. “In theory? Well, you know obscuri are an entirely unique kind of magical force, because they’re produced by suppression, which is the perfect opposite of any other interaction we have with magic. Which is why we understand them so little. That, and their volatility, of course. But it stands to reason that two obscuri would be structurally similar to a sufficient degree, so, in theory, yes. It might be possible to merge them. Although there may be any number of factors we aren’t aware of that might just as well prevent it.”

“Or cause irregularities?”

“Yes, sure. You believe Grindelwald had access to another obscurial?”

“Not an obscurial, just an obscurus.” Picquery pauses. “The one from your case, Mr. Scamander.”

Newt, who’s been studying the filigree pattern of gold and black on the coffee service like it might inspire some epiphany, looks up, surprise knitting his brows close together. “I was told it’d been destroyed.”

“That’s what our records say. But as you can imagine, they’re something less than reliable for that particular period of time. It’s far more likely that Grindelwald took the obscurus with him, than that someone at MACUSA destroyed it without anyone authorising that. Especially since that would’ve had to have been one of us.” She gestures at herself and Graves, evidently considering that argument enough. Which, really, it is.

“You, ah. Forgot to mention all that to me, ma’am,” Newt says, politely.

“I did. On purpose,” and that’s that. Tina catches Newt’s eye and hopes he understands her, _I didn’t know either!_ She’d like to know herself why this fact was kept under covers, and wonders vaguely if this kind of not-explaining, this kind of secrecy is in Picquery’s nature, or if she’s taught it to herself, and doesn’t always enjoy it. Tina’s sure she wouldn’t.

  
She turns the thing over in her head, asking herself what if— _what if you’d known? Would you have tried to find Grindelwald yourself?_ Suddenly she imagines Newt being gone, missing for months, and her stomach turns. As well as her opinion of Picquery’s, and Congress’, reticence.

“You preserved this obscurus, Mr. Scamander?” Carlotta speaks up.

“Yes,” Newt says, “I … yes.” He smiles, and hesitates. Tina recognises his discomfort and wishes they didn’t both have their hands all that visible on the table so she could take his while he tells Carlotta the story of the Sudanese girl, hurrying through the words as though that might take some of the heaviness out of the memories. But Carlotta must be both very perceptive and very kind, because she doesn’t press Newt about the girl, even though her curiosity is unmistakeable.

Instead, she asks, “Did you use a Suspension Sphere?” Carlotta’s voice sounds openly impressed, and not in the least suspicious. One scientist to another, Tina supposes, and decides she likes Carlotta quite a bit.

“Reinforced, yes.” Newt nods; then he looks around the table. “But even so, that’s hardly shatterproof. In all this time, the obscurus may still have been destroyed even if Grindelwald did take it. If the Sphere was damaged at all—”

“He still had it a few days ago,” Graves says. “I know, he showed it to me.”

There’s a moment’s surprised silence. Picquery turns to look at Graves over her shoulder.

“You forgot to mention that,” she says quietly.

Graves doesn’t answer immediately, but he looks up to meet the President’s gaze. “Yeah, I know.”

Picquery’s fingers patter over the tabletop with its vines and leaves again, lightly and aimlessly this time, disturbing nothing. Then she leans back in her chair. “Well,” she says. “That’s a point of reference at least, then.” ~~~~

Tina is suddenly reminded of the end of January, standing in the grey-clear afternoon light and watching, listening to Picquery, finding her words as cool as the day and wondering if she and Graves were friends, or something less. Certainly nothing less, she decides now. Picquery is looking at him like she has more than one question on the tip of her tongue, but is seeing something that seals her lips, at least for now, while there are others around.

“Do you know what he did with the obscurus?” Newt cuts in—cautiously, but clearly too anxious not to ask. “How he managed it?”

Graves looks at him, but only shakes his head.

Tina wonders, for just a moment, if that’s the truth now, but something about the sudden tinge of—what, defeat?—in Graves’s expression tells her the secrets have run dry for now.

“So, what happened in the end, today?” Carlotta asks. “Did the obscurus flee?”

“No,” Picquery says, “we did. That’s my point: I don’t believe we stand a chance, in the long run. Certainly not if Grindelwald somehow gains control of that obscurus; but probably not against the obscurus alone, either. I’ve seen people try at least thirty different spells and curses today, none of them did anything except whip it into more of a frenzy. Grindelwald’s people realised that too, that’s dangerous enough in itself. We barely got out alive and I’m not willing to count on our luck holding.” She pauses. “Whatever Grindelwald did, made this obscurus not only more powerful than it previously was, but also more erratic, more—” She breaks off, searching for the right word.

“Tortured,” Newt supplies, quietly. “More scared and more desperate. He can’t put himself back together anymore.”

Carlotta frowns. “What do you mean?”

“He can’t return to his human shape. He tried. When you were talking to him, Tina, he tried so very hard. But he just couldn’t.”

Tina nods. It sends a chill all over her skin, remembering the display, bones and sinews and raw flesh.

Carlotta is silent for some moments, then she shakes her head with a sigh. “I wish I could tell you something helpful,” she says. “But I have a suspicion that you know more about obscuri than I or anyone else here, Mr. Scamander.” She looks at Picquery. “I realise you came here because you need to understand what is happening, Phina. But we've all of five books on the subject in the archive.”

“And one scroll. I know.”

“So how can I help?”

“Well,” Picquery says, “if the literature has no answers ...”

Carlotta raises her eyebrows. And waits a beat, as if hoping to hear a different ending to the sentence than—“We conduct experiments?”

“Yes. As long as we don’t know what we’re dealing with, we have nothing on Grindelwald. We need an obscurus to study.”

“By Toldina the Good. You want to make an obscurus?”

“Something that comes close, at least. Structurally similar?” Picquery suggests. “We draw some unbound magic from the land, compress it to coal; try as many spells as possible on it until we find something that has an effect. It’s still magic, isn’t it? So there has to be _something_.” Carlotta keeps looking at her with some incredulity.

“And what’s your proposed timeframe for this, cara? There are hundreds of spells that have something or other to do with control or containment, and hundreds of thousands of combinations and permutations. This is a long-term project.”

“If you need somewhere to start, you can always use me,” Graves says. He gets quizzical looks from three sets of eyes in response. Only Picquery looks more like an exclamation point than a question mark.

Graves takes a breath. “Grindelwald tried to control my magic too. He did something to it, I could never figure out what exactly he did, and it never worked quite as he intended. But it had an effect that’s not all gone. So maybe that’s of some use.”

Picquery, expression turned thoughtful, studies him for a moment, then she looks at Carlotta. “I’d say this is our best shot, but it’s really our only one.” She pauses. “You work with dark energies here sometimes.”

“Oh, yes,” Carlotta agrees, “of course. After months of planning, dozens of preliminary tests, and several mile-long scrolls of calculations. Not usually at a night’s notice.”

“Not usually.”

Carlotta lets herself sink back in her chair. “Toldina,” she mutters again. She’s looking at Picquery, Tina thinks, as if she knows she’s already lost. Eventually, she shakes her head. “You know, you'll make me wistful for times when I still thought you might come and work with me here. Before you sold your soul to politics.”

Picquery laughs. “Don’t I wish I could’ve traded that thing. Is that a yes?”

“No, it’s a, _for heaven’s sake, if we must_.”

“I’ll take that, too.”

Carlotta sighs fondly. “Well. We better start thinking this through. Over dinner would be best, I think. Do you need to contact your people? Since you’ll be staying for a bit?”

_We will?_ Tina’s first thought is of Queenie. Her second is that amidst everything, she really wouldn’t mind being cooped up in this place with Newt for a day or two.

Picquery nods. “Thank you,” she says, and gets to her feet. “Come, Mr. Scamander. Lest your brother think we’ve lost you along the way.”


	13. Chapter 13

“Hey,” Jacob says, softly. And then again: “Hey, my darlin’.” _What’s on your mind darlin’ don’t worry it’ll all be all right you like the chocolate croissants best don’t you?_

Queenie surfaces from her thoughts, and finally notices the _pain au chocolat_  hovering a few inches from her face, on a plate, in Jacob’s hand. It’s fresh from the oven, the pastry caramel-gold, smelling like heaven.

She grins, and takes the plate. “Way to get a girl’s attention, Jakey.”

Jacob smiles back, and sits down across from her at the small table in the corner even though there’s a tray of just-risen erumpent rolls sitting on the worktop, waiting to be baked.

It’s early, half past five o’clock perhaps. Through a sliver of shop window that she can see from her spot, Queenie has been watching the street outside Kowalski’s slowly turn from solid black and garish streetlamp-yellow to cool greys and frosted blues. Few passers-by are as yet out and about, their thoughts thin, languid wisps of smoke trailing behind them as they hurry past with their heads ducked into upturned collars, hands buried in pockets.

Spring is already a clear, fresh taste in the air during the days now, especially in the afternoons just before the sun begins to set, but mornings are still cold, almost wintry.

Inside the bakery, all that seems of a different world, though. In here, the wood fire heating the oven wraps everything in a warmth that is soft and cosy as a cloud. _Not to say toasty_ , Jacob quipped once, with a wink, pleased as punch with his pun.

Queenie loves to be here this time of morning: before the bakery opens, before she has to be at Woolworth. She loves to get up with Jacob, even if it’s at half past three; to listen to him hum some tune they heard on the wireless the night before, stuck in his head, as he gets ready; to walk through the sleeping streets with him, arm tucked through his, chatting in low voices as if they were likely to wake anybody.

Admittedly, it makes her own working day something of a drag, interspersed with considerably more yawns than usual, but it’s worth it, spending this time with Jacob once or twice a week. She’ll sit and drink sweet creamy coffee while Jacob makes the pastries and rolls, the French bread and the fluffy American sandwich loaves for the morning crowd. Here and there, she’ll help, brushing croissants with egg wash, or dusting fluffy redcurrant puffskeins with powdered sugar.

A time or two, slipping out the back door to Apparate to Woolworth at a quarter to eight, she’s forgotten the Cleaning Charm and arrived at her desk with frosting on her nose or flour on her dress.

A time or two, she almost forgot on purpose: because it doesn’t matter if somebody spots traces of where she’s been, who she’s been with, and that has to be one of the best feelings in the world, Queenie thinks; and she’ll let that feeling seep into her bones, and all the way to the tips of her toes. The wonder that she gets to have this despite the string of perfectly unlikely things it took to make it possible.

Jacob spreads out his hand, palm turned upwards on the table. The wireless on the shelf susurrates a jazzy melody, crackling like a snowstorm. Queenie places her hand in Jacob’s, and he wraps his floured fingers around hers tightly.

“Tina’s all right,” he tells her. “And Newt’s all right, too. They do this kinda thing all the time, don’t they? Each in their own way.”

Queenie sighs. “Yeah,” she says slowly. “I suppose so. I don’t know. It’s just that—” She pauses and worries her bottom lip, tasting lipstick. It’s just that she doesn’t know what kind of _thing_ it really is, only that it’s to do with Grindelwald, and Grindelwald—“Grindelwald ain’t just another criminal, you know? And he sure ain’t the sort of monster you’d want to make cookies of.”

Jacob laughs. “Oh, but maybe for Halloween, I was thinkin’?” Then he grows serious again. “I know the fella’s dangerous. But I also know Tina and Newt are really good at magic, right? They’ve both fought him before. And they’ll be lookin’ out for each other. So what can go wrong?”

Queenie looks up at him. Memories are tumbling through his mind like rockfall: of how he and his brother were going to look out for each other. How he was going to look out for his brother. How things weren’t supposed to go wrong the way they did.

How he hopes against hope that she isn’t hearing those thoughts too clearly right now, or if she is, that she believes what he said anyway because he still means, _I mean it it’ll all be fine I’m sure it will_.

She reaches out to cup his cheek.

“You’re right,” she says. “You’re right. They’ll be fine. In a few days, they’ll be back, and we’ll all have dinner together on Sunday, and everything’ll be back to how it’s supposed be.” And then her determined conviction slips a little again anyway, and she sighs. “I just wish I could’ve talked to Teenie, you know? Instead of getting one of those blasted office notices.” ~~~~

She was about to pack up for the day, yesterday, returning to her desk from taking the minutes at meeting that had run late. The paper mouse was waiting for her along with half a dozen others informing her about rescheduled or cancelled meetings for today, about some mid-tier official visiting from across the country requiring a half–hour’s entertainment with small talk; a message from someone with very loose morals or no ears asking her out to lunch; and waiting in line patiently, marked in no special way as if it were as insignificant as all the other mice, the note about Tina.

She felt like she was freezing up from the inside. She’s always worried about her auror sister, of course she has. Never in a million years would she have said so to Tina, but she was a little grateful, a little relieved, when Tina got demoted and put on desk duty indefinitely. _But it’s safe behind a desk, so what if you got used to it?,_ she thought every time Tina complained, regretted her misstep with Mary Lou Barebone, or fretted over her future. She thought, _Maybe you’ll find it ain’t so bad._  

Even though she’d never have said so, and even though she never really believed it herself, Queenie hoped. Then Director Graves, or the President, or both of them sent five people, none of them inexperienced or slow on their feet, after Gellert Grindelwald, and he just snuffed them all out like so many candles; and before the shock of it had even drained from the hallway chatter throughout Woolworth, Tina had her auror badge back.

And now it’s Tina who’s going after Grindelwald, just as Queenie feared when they all spun that yarn about a state visit.

 _Dear Miss Goldstein, We hereby notify you that Auror Porpentina Goldstein is accompanying the President on a visit to Greenland._ _Sincerely, p.p. Laurence Cadell_

Visit. _Sure_ , Queenie thought. The note is something of a courtesy, of course, and it’s better than nothing, better than having to rely on the grapevine and fly-by thoughts, but it’s also infuriatingly little, too vague, too full of terrible possibilities. _What’s in Greenland?_ , Queenie wonders for the hundredth time. And _how long’s it gonna take, is Tina coming straight home from there?_

It all seems very strange, and very wrong, and Queenie prays that the feeling in the pit of her stomach is only worry, not foreboding.

“Don’t you have ways?” Jacob asks into her thoughts. “Magical ways, of talking to each other? Like that … flea thing? You told me about?”  

That surprises a giggle out of Queenie. “The floo,” she corrects, and then nods. “Yeah. We do, but it ain’t like the telephone. I can’t just call anywhere, you know?”

 _No_ , she hears Jacob think fondly. _I didn’t know that_.

He’s looking at her that way again, the way he did the very first night they met, sitting across from each other at the dinner table at Mrs. Esposito’s. And as always when he does this, Queenie finds it hard to hold on to a gloomy thought. Jacob just eases her heart.

She squeezes his hand a little more tightly, watches his smile widen.

“Well, Mr. Kowalski.,” she says. “I’ll need some fresh coffee with this _pain au chocolat_. Permission to enchant your coffee pot?”

Jacob beams. “Enchant away, darlin’.”

As always when she’s here, the time with Jacob passes too quickly. She helps him lay out his wares on the shelves and étagères on the shopfloor, and, when he’s flipped the sing in the door to _Open_ at seven o’clock, with the first few customers.

At a quarter to eight, she slips out the back door and Apparates to Woolworth.

All through the day, the mood in the building is subdued and oddly weightless at the same time. There’s a sense, while everyone keeps going diligently about their business, of suspense, as if someone had Levitated the whole of headquarters a fraction out of the ground. Not enough to cause damage, just enough for everyone to feel a little off-kilter.

It’s because the President isn’t there, of course.

Not because she’s away, but because she was supposed to be back with most of her team, as opposed to off on an unplanned mission the purpose of which remains nebulous.

 _She’s behaving like some hotspur rookie_ , Queenie heard someone mutter in the break room, and the sentiment isn’t universal, but it’s also not exotic.

Many of the things the President spends her days debating with the executive board or Congress or the ICW, many of the decisions she makes stay behind closed doors, of course. But this time, the secrecy is noticeable, like a faint smell or a low-frequency sound.  

Fenwick, Ludlow, and Ventresca are back at their desks, cuts and bruises and cracked ribs, and they’re playing it close to the vest, too, whether under orders or not. The few times she finds an excuse to swing by Investigations, she picks up a clearer picture than they draw in words of what the boy Credence Barebone is suffering, _Grindelwald’s doing_ they’re all convinced, but they don’t know, and neither do they know anything else that Queenie doesn’t.

O’Brien is in hospital with a nasty head wound, but he’s expected back in a week as well and at least, Queenie keeps thinking, at least this time, no one got blasted to pieces far from home. _Yet,_ she doesn’t think _._ She refuses to.

She spends her day doing her chores, opening her paper mice with trembling fingers, but there’s never anything more about Tina; only meetings, a collection for someone’s birthday, business as usual.

It’s dusk when she returns to the bakery, a little while past closing time. She knows Jacob will still be cleaning up and preparing for tomorrow morning, and she’s entertaining half a thought of talking him into stopping for dinner on the way home.

They don’t often go out, on weeknights. They’ve a tendency to follow up a dinner out with a nightcap somewhere, because Jacob can’t get enough of magical night life, and then when they get home, they usually end up with another nightcap on the carpet in front of the fireplace, and before they know it it’s two hours before Jacob has to be on his way again.

Queenie knows she’ll be sorry in the small hours tomorrow, but she thinks that tonight, she might be selfish enough to ask for the distraction, and she’s fairly confident that Jacob’s going to indulge her.

But distraction comes in a different shape before Queenie’s even exchanged a word with him. Her coat floating towards the rack in the hallway behind her, Queenie steps into the workshop and finds herself looking at the table full of sugar cookies, and Modesty Barebone kneeling on one of the chairs, decorating them with piping bags of pastel-coloured icing.

“Oh,” Queenie says, softly. Modesty came into her thoughts time and again today, but she’s been losing trains of thought quickly among the strange, restrained chaos at MACUSA and her fretting over Tina.

Now here she is, dress more frayed than last time Queenie saw her, one of her boots split open a good two inches along the sole—a frail little reminder of the world outside Queenie’s worry.

Queenie musters a bright smile. “Hello little birdie,” she greets Modesty. “What a lovely surprise.”

Jacob looks up. “Hi, darlin’,” he says, his thoughts loud and falling over their own feet. _I don’t know if this was a good idea I mean I know it probably wasn’t a good idea but I just couldn’t Look how happy she seems I know I know what do we do later but I couldn’t just leave her outside could I?_

Later that evening, Queenie finds out that Jacob spotted the girl outside, on the other side of the street, around lunchtime: watching the bakery, shy, half-hidden behind the corner of a building. She was there and gone and then there again, and eventually, Jacob went outside and waved at her, and waited until she came across the street.

Modesty was hungry, and cold—someone had taken the peach coloured scarf from her—and she seemed constantly on the verge of bolting, but tethered to the spot by the baked good displayed in the shop windows of Kowalski’s.

“I know I should’ve just sent her on her way again,” Jacob mutters abashedly. “Given her some food and, I don’t know, told her to come back tomorrow? But she looked so lost ‘n lonely, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. How do you send a kid back out into the street, when it’s still so cold?”

Queenie just wants to kiss him for his tender heart, so she does. Then she looks over at Modesty eating her supper of bread with jam, and a cup of warm milk with honey.

“And then you hired her?” she asks teasingly.

Jacob grins and rubs the back of his neck. “Well,” _I was looking for reason to keep her in here where it’s safe and warm,_ “I told myself I couldn’t just keep giving food away, so I gave her some work, you know? Finishing them occamies.”

“Mhm.”

“And the Dougals.”

“’Course.”

She smiles, and shakes her head. She really does love this man.

But Jacob’s right, of course. They’re digging themselves a little bit of a hole here, and this certainly isn’t what Tina meant when she asked that Queenie keep an eye on their little orphan girl.

She thinks of her sister quoting the President just a few days ago, _We can’t just go picking no-maj children off the streets_ , thinks of everything that happened since last night, and the whole Second Salem mess, and suddenly she feels just defiant enough.

“Well, I don’t suppose,” she says, “anyone’d notice if a little girl snuck in here at night and slept on that cot you still have in the backroom, would they?”

When he first opened the bakery and hadn’t quite worked out the best rhythm to get all his work done, Jacob would spend a few nights a week here. The makeshift bed he put up for the purpose is still there, covered in empty flour sacks and delivery boxes.

How should anybody know? The President certainly won’t, all the way in blasted Greenland.

Jacob grins at her widely. “No, I don’t s’ppose so either,” he says just as Queenie resolves to swing by Tina’s desk tomorrow on some pretense, snarf the file on Modesty’s birth mother, and see if there isn’t something she can do to help move things along a little.

—

Three thousand miles from New York and two hours further into the night, Seraphina turns into one of Oserfia’s long, meandering corridors, letting her head fall back a little as she walks in an attempt to undo some of the tension in her neck.

After a day holed up deep, deep in the ice, where the magic is rawest and mistakes in handling it do the least damage, they’ve managed to create something—small, pitch dark, vibrating with power, but stable in a Containment Sphere of Newt Scamander’s making. They observed it for a time, and debated how to proceed.

It was a good moment for taking a break—a couple hours for regrouping their thoughts. At any rate, Seraphina’s third call of the day with anxious, long-suffering, loyal Laurence is due, and they’re all famished enough to somewhat prioritise dinner over science. So Carlotta went to arrange for the latter, Scamander went in search of Tina Goldstein, undoubtedly, and Seraphina is headed for her rooms, and the floo-enabled fireplace there.

She traces the inlaid patterns that decorate the wood-panelling along the corridors, letting them remind her of the days she spent here, years ago, almost sure that this, the work here, was what she wanted to do with her life.

 _Before I sold my soul_ , she thinks with a smirk, recalling Carlotta’s good-natured jibe.

Then she rounds another corner, and forgets all about her student years, stopping dead in her tracks.

Ahead, where the hallway forks again around a delicate Japanese cabinet, perches a creature, pearly white, shimmering around the edges, unmistakeably recognisable: Graves’s patronus.

“What are you doing here?” Seraphina asks—the question pure reflex. Patronuses don’t make conversation, of course. They don’t answer or interact. They can only deliver messages.

The lynx is poised, tense, like a blown-glass figure on the brink of shattering into a thousand shards. It’s looking at her, but it stays mute: no message, then.

Seraphina feels deep unease settle in her chest. Patronuses also don’t materialise of their own volition. They certainly don’t wander off to loiter in hallways.

Not unless something is very wrong.


	14. Chapter 14

Seraphina worries her lip as she strides along the hallway, past tapestries and more cabinetry, her thoughts spiralling outwards from the image of the lynx lingering before her mind’s eye.

It looked so much stronger than three days-that-feel-like-months ago, in the Savannah marshes: not quite as sharp and bright as it is usually, but also not nearly as wispy and heavy-limbed, only just shimmered into corporeality, as it did that night.

But it was alone, tonight, unmoored, far from where it’s meant to be. Severed. That turns the good sign bad.

Her lip stings, and she tastes blood. “Dammit,” she mutters in irritation, just as she passes an alabaster statue of a goliath heron preening importantly atop a marble pedestal. It interrupts itself to rasp reprovingly at her and her disproportionate cursing. Seraphina ignores it.

She feels like the ground has sagged away a fraction underneath her feet. She knew Graves was grappling with everything that had happened, that’s not what’s caught her so off guard. Ninety-two days have room for many hexes and curses and words, and Grindelwald is no amateur; and then there’s the fact that it all happened in the first place. She knew it wasn’t over just because it’s in the past.

She knew from the way Graves didn’t want her coffee, but didn’t want to sleep either, the second night at her house when they talked and talked until she thought he’d rather listen to her recount the past months’ unprecedented developments in the stock exchange, than let her fall silent.

She knew from his studied patience and the barely noticeable tension in his shoulders during the Congress session.

From the way he’s been keeping things from her. Something he’s rarely ever done. Not from her. Never when it mattered like this.

It was just that she thought Grindelwald, his dark magic and his Legilimency and his lies, would at long last go the way all such trials go: deeper and deeper below the surface until they touch down somewhere reasonably safeguarded, and resurface only in the occasional sleepless night, the occasional fretful dream; until they’ve soaked up enough whiskey and time that they can’t move very fast, or too unexpectedly.

An untethered Patronus bespeaks something different, however. Some injury, some wound that won’t be bandaged up with words or distractions or liquor, won’t heal with time and leave a scar where the knit seam of skin turns numb. Something that doesn’t heal and keeps reopening. Like shellshock, some revenant distress so ghastly and ugly that it makes the magic Patronuses are spun from gather itself together tight and small, and put itself at a safe distance.

She’s seen it happen before: not often, once or twice. It hasn’t been that uncommon since the war.

But she didn’t see it coming now. With Graves.

His rooms, when she pushes the door open and walks through without waiting to hear if her knock will be answered, are quiet, and dark.

A tinge of smoke is laced through the air from the fire burnt down to embers, whispering softly and soothingly, and a white glow posing as moonlight filters through the clouded ice panes of the checkerboard windows, milky and thin, illuminating little more than a few uncertain squares of parquet.

Seraphina searches the shadows, layered one atop the other like billowing lengths of cloth, and suddenly wonders if Graves is even here; and where else she could possibly look for him, how to find him in this place that doesn’t like to give up things that would rather stay hidden.

But the dark begins to map itself into more intelligible shapes as her eyes grow accustomed to it, and she does find him.

Quickly, she winds her way among the furniture, and crouches in front of him where he’s huddled on the floor, out of reach of the embers’ pinprick eyes and the moon, hunched over with his back against one of the chairs clustered near the fireplace.

She says his name quietly, and puts her hand to the side of his neck, her thumb against his jaw to make him look up. He doesn’t quite resist, but doesn’t meet her eyes, either—embarrassed? Dismayed that she’s walked in on him when the past has pulled him under and undone him like this? _It’s me. Me._

His skin is very warm to her touch, clammy, and his pulse beats quickly beneath it, a flutter against the heel of her hand. He draws a steadying breath that doesn’t seem to steady him much just yet.

“Incendio,” Seraphina murmurs. All these shadows, she thinks, can’t be helping. They’re certainly not helping her see as much as she’d like.

“Percival,” she coaxes again as the smouldering coals in the grate hiss in her spell and breathe out tall, bright flames, “look at me.” She has more words on her lips already, _it’s over, you’ll be fine, it’s in the past, it’s all right,_ but it clearly isn’t, and she falters.

Whatever it was that’s brought Grindelwald so inescapably back to Graves—memories turned too sharp in solitude and inertia, or perhaps he fell asleep and dreamt—it’s left vivid marks. And she knows what the Patronus meant, she knew he’d be distressed. Her throat goes a bit tight anyway.

Even in the forgiving firelight, Graves looks ghostly pale and ill, drawn— _Fragile_ , she thinks, and that’s not a word she’s ever applied to her friend, not even recently. He’s bleeding again, like yesterday out on the ice, the blood thick and dark, crusting on his bloodless lips, smudged in harsh scarlet on his hands, his cheekbone, his temple.

His eyes are pitch dark, bright and bruised, lashes clumped together. He’s cried.

She tries to swallow past what feels like a pebble right between her collarbones: something pent up, she knows. She’s had a government to run and a vital department to reorganise since December 7th, and an international criminal to hunt, and she’s been gagging and binding all kinds of jagged, sharp, fierce things within her. But for the past few days her resolve has been developing cracks so right now, she’ll be furious at Grindelwald. For doing this to her best friend, _what did he do to you?_

Seraphina ducks her head to finally catch his gaze, wondering what words will get through to Graves, what she can offer to break the hold the past has on him at this moment. Unexpectedly but unsurprisingly, the summer of ’02 comes back to her again. _I’d know better how to help you if we were just school kids again_. Back then, she spent hours just listening, hours talking. Evenings just being there saying nothing.

Now, she wonders what’s changed, making it so hard to decide what to say, or whether or not to say anything at all.

The next moment, she loses that train of thought, becoming aware of something. This close to him, she can smell his skin, his hair damp with sweat; and the petrichor of strong magic.

She frowns, because _what magic was this?_ Even nearly dissipated, there’s a density to it that’s at odds with the lightness, the soda-powder tingle a Patronus Charm would leave. It’s bitter and cold, a taste of copper on her tongue that bespeaks something arcane, raw, elemental.

She tries to match it to something familiar, but it remains unrecognizable to her, and that is less than reassuring.

Reflexively, Seraphina cranes her neck to look around the room as best as she can from her vantage point, wondering if she could have it all wrong. And something happened: something present rather than past.

It’s near impossible to imagine: here, in the middle of the Sermersuaq, at Orserfia which is covered in charms and enchantments and wards thicker than the ice it’s built into. And she can see nothing at all amiss, no physical indication of the magic that’s occurred here.

Yet it has to have come from something, has to be something.

“He’s got him.”

Seraphina turns back to Graves, and blinks. “What?”

“Grindelwald,” he says. “Has the obscurus.” He shrugs oddly. “Or as good as.”

“What are you—” Seraphina begins, perplexed, before her mind gathers itself back together from about the room, and catches up. “You had a vision?”

He just nods.

For a moment, she stares at him. She did have it wrong. The spilled magic, she realises, is that of Seeing. No wonder it’s so unfamiliar to her, and feels so archaic, tastes like rust and iron ore.

 _But_.

“Since when are they this strong?”

“They’re not,” Graves says, an urgency in his voice. It sounds like desperation more than denial. “They weren’t. I haven’t had visions like this since—It wasn’t ever like this again. After Quin died.”

 _Oh_ , Seraphina thinks. _Oh, Mercy_. She feels like she’s suddenly kneeling in a hailstorm of puzzle pieces all pelting into place, smacking her around the head on their way. (As they should.) ~~~~

“I’ve no idea why it’s happening again, it’s … Credence, the obscurus, there’s something about it all that—” He makes a vague gesture, and doesn’t finish.

Seraphina wants to launch herself at him and wrap her arms around him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she interlocks her fingers in her lap and gives them both several moments before she asks: “Do you know where Grindelwald is?”

Graves shakes his head despondently. “It wasn’t clear enough. Somewhere mountainous. I think. Might still be Scotland. Might be anywhere.”

“All right.”

“Hardly,” Graves spits.

“Percival—”

“What?” And of course, this would be the moment he finally looks at her. Eyes sparking, livid. _There we go_ , Seraphina thinks. She’s bad at dealing with him when he gets like this. Angry at himself, losing all ability to take a step back. It aggravates her in turn. She presses her lips together, and wrestles the feeling down. Usually, some anger does good service when they argue, as opposed to either of them putting on kid gloves. There’s little benefit in it: they’re better turning upset into something sharp that can get chipped off and blunted until it’s gone again; but this is a kind of anger, a kind of hurt she isn’t so confident about. This is his Achilles’ heel.

Evidently.

 _Of course_. _God_ , she thinks. It all adds up so chillingly well.

_After Quin died._

She’s been around him, over the years, when his visions have visited. They’re like a faint headache, something vague and formless at the edges of his vision that’s easy to ignore as long as he looks straight ahead. It’s a nuisance, it makes him testy and tired. It stays manageable. Then it goes away.

This was different. Massive and inescapable, loud and searingly bright, a storm with no shelter.

It’s why the Patronus fled: not because of anything Grindelwald did, even though she doubts three months of mental strain and physical privation helped.

But it happened because Graves couldn’t keep himself from Seeing, keep this visions small and quiet like he’s done since he was sixteen years old and mourning his brother.

Seraphina forces the memories and her anxiousness to the back of her mind and softly says, “Evanesco.” The drying blood, and the tracks of tears, fade from his skin.

Somehow, it seems to have been the right thing to do. Graves scowls at his clean hands, a little sheepishly perhaps, as if he thinks he should have been able to do that himself—but then the tension that’s pulled the corners of his eyes and his shoulder tight, drains away as well, and he takes another deep breath.

“Sera,” he says after a moment, “you don’t know—”

“What?” she prompts when he doesn’t immediately continue. “What else do I not know?”

“We wouldn’t be here. If I’d learned to harness my visions like everybody else who has the Sight does. Instead of investing all that time and energy into suppressing them.”

Once again, the marshes; the summer before her final year. Nighttime and a million stars like silver powder across the sky above them. _I don’t know if you can_ , she told him back then, _shut down your Sight. It’s strong magic. Elemental. It has a will._ But of course, all of Percival’s magic is strong and was so even then, and so he figured it out. Fast enough to make her head spin.

Now, she says: “You don’t know that.”

“Of course not,” he retorts, the bite back in his voice. “But it seems like a pretty safe bet, wouldn’t you say?”

“No. Visions are only so reliable. Everyone’s. Always. You know that. If you saw clear as crystal we might still be in this exact place, right now.”

She’s truly convinced of this, but she can tell he isn’t taking her word for it, though he says nothing for a minute or so. Instead, he looks into the flames she rekindled, but immediately squints, and starts blinking rapidly. And turns away again.

 _Too bright_. She remembers— _now_ she remembers—that he told her once how the visions sometimes glaze everything with too much brightness. Not always, but sometimes. This time, for sure. _Hence the smothered fire, Seraphina_.

Graves rubs his eyelids.

“The visions grew more frequent after the Second Salem incident, after I’d met Credence Barebone. Not stronger, but more. I ignored it.” He lets some seconds tick past staring at the tasseled fringe of the Ottoman rug they’re both sitting on. “The first vision I had, this strong, I was at Woolworth. My office. It was after midnight, I think. I lost my Patronus then, too. That never happened before, and I didn’t recognise it. It’s the strangest feeling, Sera. Like being gutted. I couldn’t figure out what it was, where it came from. Until I tried to summon a Shield Charm later. I left MACUSA, which was just stupid. I should’ve stayed put until it was over. But I was so goddamned worried that someone would see me like this. And there’d be questions and then someone would work it all out. So I left. I didn’t trust myself to Apparate, so I walked. I don’t remember where. Back alleys.” He pauses. “That was on the night of December 5th.”

 _Oh, Mercy_ , Seraphina thinks, again. Beginning to wish things would stop making all that much sense.

“That’s how Grindelwald got you.”

Graves says nothing, but he’s really said enough.

“He was targeting you because of your proximity to what he didn’t know yet was an obscurus. But he couldn’t have known about your visions. He was just hoping you’d lead him to the source of all that magic bouncing about New York. And then he caught you all but defenceless … and perhaps he caught on then, too. That you were seeing things about what was happening. Did he recognise the symptoms?” The feverishness, the distraction, the bleeding. The things _she_ should have read right. Graves raises an eyebrow. _Conceivably. Probably._ “At any rate, he seized the chance.”

“So,” Graves concludes. His voice is like dry wood now, hollow and splintering. “We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been clean out of my wits that night because that vision hit me like a freight train.” He glances over at the fire again, squinting, but he doesn’t let himself be deterred again as quickly. As if he were trying to force out the physical reminders of what just happened.

Seraphina’s shifts herself into a cross-legged position, her knees beginning to ache; then she plucks off the tie that’s been keeping her hair out of her eyes all day, because it’s started to twinge. Another time, she’d just ignore the discomfort. But now, the fussing buys her a little time, to decide how to respond. The thing with Graves is, he’s hard to lie to. Especially when it’s about himself.

“All right,” she says eventually. “Maybe. It doesn’t matter now, we _are_ here. You can’t go back and change what happened.” She pauses and waits for a concession. It doesn’t come.

This isn’t the first time either of them has made a mistake that’s had consequences for others. It’s never easy, but they both know it’s unavoidable, being who they are. It happens and when it does and all else fails, they talk each other into forgiving themselves.

But usually, this she also knows, it doesn’t go as deep as this. This—his decision to deny his visions the power and clarity they want and could have—is tied to something deep within himself, and she has a feeling it’ll take a lot of work to convince him that this one, this mistake, isn’t the end of the world either.

She definitely won’t manage it before dinner, so she changes tack.

“We’ve made progress today,” she tells him. “We’ve managed to create something we think is close enough to a true obscurus to experiment on with some hope for usable results. Another one is … hatching, shall we say? So we can see what happens if we try to fuse them. It’ll take a few hours before we can—”

“There’s no time,” Graves cuts across her, voice tensed up.

Seraphina waits a moment. Then she firmly says: “There’ll have to be. Grindelwald getting to Credence Barebone before us was always in the cards. There’s nothing we can do about it except for what we already _are_ doing. And we can’t speed it up, magic has its own pace, you know that.”

He might as well not be listening for all the effect her words are having. _Fine,_ she thinks. It’s the last thing she wants to do: rub salt into this old wound and the fresh scratches and scrapes around it. But maybe the kid gloves are a bit too soft after all. Maybe the only way out is through, and the truth is—

This has been nipping at the back of her mind all day, like a bird locked in and beating its wings against a window incessantly. She’s been ignoring it studiously, reluctant to let it out even while she knows that in the long run, there’s be no way around it. It’s just that there’s two parts to this question. The first is: “Why didn’t you tell me about the second obscurus?” She understands why he said nothing before Congress. Perhaps even why he said nothing during the meeting afterwards. But to her?

The second part is: _You know you can trust me. Don’t you? Even with this thing at the bottom of your soul._

Do _you still trust me?_

She bites her tongue, and he takes a while to answer.

“I just … I know I should’ve told you. I didn’t because—” He pauses, visibly frustrated. “Grindelwald kept showing it to me because he thought it could trigger a vision. Perhaps that’s how it works for trained seers. For him. It didn’t work on me. But I just—” He trails off again.

“Didn’t want too talk about the visions.”

Graves grimaces. “Didn’t want to talk about the visions. Yes. Which wasn’t my call to make. I put people at risk. Our people, the Brits. You. I know.”

Seraphina frowns, wondering suddenly: “Did you know what he was going to do with it? What would happen with the two obscuri?” No matter how she feels about all of this, how much she feels with him, it’s true that it’s muddled enough as it is. But, _did you know what we were walking into yesterday?_ Because that would be—difficult.

He compresses his lips for a tense moment, but then he says, “Of course not.” It sounds like he’s wondering, too: _Do you still trust me?_ A piece of wood pops loudly in the fire and it’s feels like a bubble burst right above her head. She wants to laugh out loud. _What an impossible, incredible, indescribable mess_. _Start to finish_.

Graves sighs and slides a fraction further down along the armrest of the chair he’s leaning against. “I knew he was after Credence’s obscurus,” he continues, “but that’s all. He never told me what he was planning. He’s arrogant, but not careless. I honestly believed that it was all he could do with an isolated obscurus, to dangle it in front of my nose day in day out.”

Seraphina nods. That, at least, was an honest mistake. “As we’d all have assumed if we’d known, until Scotland.”

His face is angled down again, and half obscured, but she thinks he wrinkles his nose. “Stop making excuses for me.”

She shrugs. “One of us has to,” she says lightly, and reaches up on impulse, pushing his hair back from his forehead. It’s a mess, the sweaty strands tangling around her fingers as she tries to comb them into some semblance of order.

“Stop it,” he mutters.

Seraphina quirks an eyebrow. “You like that.”

“Yeah, that’s my point.”

 _And probably_ , she thinks with a little jolt, _you’re right._ What is she even doing anymore.

She drops her hand and laces her fingers together again, and concentrates on the heat of fire against her back for some seconds. Then she says: “I’m sorry I haven’t seen you all day. I got so caught up in the work—”

Graves huffs, and peers up at her. _When did you get so sentimental?_ “You’re not my keeper, Picquery.”

“No,” she agrees. That would be one hell of a job. “I am supposed to be your friend, though.”

She feels like a lousy friend. For not realising what was really happening. Again.

He smiles, which, all considered, is remarkable progress on this particular occasion. “You are. Sera, I’d be losing my mind without you here.”

 _Yeah,_ she thinks. _I can relate._ There’s a quiet scratching sound, some rustling, before an origami swallow swoops over the backrest of the chair, and lands on the rug a foot away from them. They both consider it for a moment, then Seraphina looks back at him. “Is there anything else I don’t know about, Percival?”

“No. Promise.”

She nods. “Good.”

Graves picks up the bird, which has been sitting motionlessly, but starts wriggling the moment he touches it. It flutters in a narrows circle, then alights on his hand and chirps importantly.

“Carlotta has such a hand for the most intricate enchantments,” Seraphina says. “But she’s never managed a message that actually let itself be read. I don’t know what it is with that.” She pauses, and gestures at the bird, now preening atop the backrest of the chair. “That’ll be about dinner. Which means I have to go. I’m late for my call with Laurence.” She sighs, feeling somewhat drained herself now, all of a sudden. “He doesn’t say it, but he thinks I should get back to New York, preferably yesterday. He’s probably right,” she adds as she gets to her feet.

Graves catches her wrist, and Seraphina stops mid-movement, looking down at him. “I didn’t say I _would_ go,” she says softly. He lets go of her again, and she does her best not to smile, _what was your point again_?

“I’ll see you at dinner,” she tells him. “Half an hour. You hear me?”

Graves hums, and when he’s met with expectant silence, says: “Yes, Ma’am.”

She rolls her eyes, and takes her leave. She doesn’t see the lynx on the way to her own rooms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea for Graves's patronus temporarily abandoning him in this chapter, came from the comic _Stand Sill Stay Silent_ , and what it says about trauma and [the luonto](http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=412) in Finnish mythology.


End file.
